1:27pm: *Coff*
Addendum to the Murphy's law about "when the repairman comes to look at your broken toaster, it will work perfectly"

Today I have a fever of 38 and a bit.  Last night it was over 39 (the thermometer just reads "Hi" after that).  But when I went to the quack yesterday, no fever.  Why does this matter?  (given that it's only an upper respiratory tract infection - it's not like the treatment changes("get some bloody rest"))

Because it matters for my exams.  I'm not incapacitated , just impaired.  I could attend my exam yesterday.  I just wasn't performing my best.  It's not going to make a difference between excelling and failing, but it could make a couple of points difference.  I'm glad that special consideration doesn't mean boosting marks, but since I'm sick enough that getting out of bed seems a chore, I think that some kind of recognition within the system might be ... appropriate?

2:12pm: Review and rating of campsites
Following on from earlier posts, can anyone remember anything about campsites? Some of these, I can remember enough to review:

( Merricks )
( Wombat Corner )
( Golden Valleys Lodge, Mornington )
( Polana )
( Camp Narbethong )
( Britannia Park )

Other Campsites: (and things that might jog some memory):
Don Bosco – Trolley jousting
Heathcote Junction / Wandong – Ping pong; Rod R brought a telescope; Pennie hit her head. Not on ACA website, might no longer be operational.
Campaspe Downs – was this MIV98?
Anglesea – Booze forbidden at all
Mt Evelyn – Upstairs dorms, downstairs dining, possibly catered-only
Traralgon (Campsite name?) – had a fucking peacock. Most annoying bird ever.
Fern Gully Lodge, Healesville
Place north of melbourne for combined camp Dec 2004

And there was some place that had a (small) inbuilt spa...

1:55pm: I can't remember MUCS history either
Following on from my request for MonUCS history (I'll be putting all info on AICSApedia, and into the MonUCS google docs. Committee can post elsewhere as they like.)

Can anyone assist my memory for MUCS events?
( MUCS events )

Other concerts I can remember performing, but can't recall the dates
Carmina & Vine were combined at least twice - once for MUCS 60th, 2nd time with RMPS
African Sanctus
Mozart Req
Nick Cowall's Russian December
Dixit Dominus ?1999?
Judas Maccabeus

11:41pm: My memory is shot

I've been trying to compile a list of campsites we've been to, and to review what they're like.  In aid of this, I've been trying to compile a list of camps by date.  To try to help with this, I've tried to list the concerts we've done.  My memory has been drawing blank after blank.  That's a big chunk of my life forgotten.  So, here's what I can remember for MonUCS... ALL that I can remember for MonUCS

2004:
December Camp: Somewhere North of Melbourne.  Combined with MUCS

2005:
Ragtime.  At some stage.

2006:
Fresher Day Clayton Rd
May Concert: Mozart's Wallpaper Mass,
September concert ?
December Camp:  (Campoff: Joe) 

2007
Fresher Day ?Clayton Rd
Cherubfest: Vivaldi Gloria - Mount Waverley Comm Centre
May Camp:   ??Polana (Campoff: Joe)
May Concert: Mozart Requiem & Vivaldi Gloria
August Camp: Polana (Campoff: Joe) Theme: Russia (“From Russia with Love?” - or was that the year before)
Annual Dinner: Something to do with hippies
December Camp: Polana (Campoff: Ollie) Election

2008
Fresher Day: Huntingdale centre
May Camp: Wombat Corner (Campoff: Ollie).  Theme:  “Timewarp”
May Concert: Messiah
August Camp: Golden Valleys (Campoff: Ollie) “A Midwinter Night's Dream”
September Concert: RV Williams,
Annual Dinner: Mad Hatter's Tea Party
December Narbethong (Campoff: Susie) Saint-Saens

2009
Fresher Day: ? Mt Waverley
May Camp: Brittania Park (Campoff: Susie) Under the Sea
May Concert: Mozart GM & Bortnianski

5:04pm: More Statistics!
Hopefully, not bad statistics this time :P

One of the more gladdening pieces of this sort I've read in recent times:

  WHY THE GODS ARE NOT WINNING by Gregory Paul & Phil Zuckerman
   http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/paul07/paul07_index.html

Excerpts:
A myth is gaining ground... The proposition is that after God died in the secular 20th century, He is back in a big way as people around the world again find faith.

... ...  (I like ellipses perhaps too much)...What scheme of thought did soar in the 20th century?  The number of nonreligionists….  throughout the 20th century has skyrocketed from 3.2 million in 1900, to 697 million in 1970, and on to 918 million in AD 2000…. Equally startling has been the meteoritic growth of secularism….  agnosticism…. and atheism…. From a miniscule presence in 1900, a mere 0.2% of the globe, these systems…. are today expanding at the extraordinary rate of 8.5 million new converts each year, and are likely to reach one billion adherents soon. ... It is well documented that Christianity has withered dramatically in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Japan.. Churches are being converted into libraries, laundromats and pubs.

... One Great Faith has risen from one eighth to one fifth of the globe in a hundred years, and is projected to rise to one quarter by 2050. Islam. But education and the vote have little to do with it. Generally impoverished and poorly educated, most Muslims live in nations where democracy is minimalist or absent. Nor are many infidels converting to Allah.  Longman was correct on one point; Islam is growing because Muslims are literally having lots of unprotected sex. The absence of a grand revival of Christ, Allah and Vishnu worship via democratic free choice brings us to a point, as important as it is little appreciated — the chronic inability of religion to recruit new adherents on a consistent, global basis.

10:05pm: Too much research not associated with my degree
Other people know more about much of this than me. Anyone got any input (Hey Nicki!)
Sorry about the crappy formatting!  Updating to include suggestions by commenters will come with changes for vague completeness - later

Establishing guidelines for

catering for special dietary needs

An introduction: Why guidelines are needed

( more... )

Anyway, I find it odd that some clubs apparently dedicated to macho bullshit always cater well for vegans, yet some events under the general MSA banner -which is allegedly all about inclusion and representation- seem not to be able to provide vegetarian food at many of their events!

Based on these considerations, I would like to suggest the adoption of the following guidelines:

Catering Guidelines

 

( The long-winded versions )

Summary:

 

1. Cater in proportion to dietary restrictions

2. Consider dietary restrictions when above the critical number

3. Use the best information available
   Ed: 3b - pre-sold events are different (see ETFB's comment)

4. Make allergens identifiable.

5. Make a reasonable effort

6. Catering to the lowest common denominator is OK

 

Deciding the “Nominal Proportions” of food restrictions in the University Population

 

( more... )

ED: (I was always planning on putting this in) Info about various dietary restrictions
Deciding the minimum number

 

( Read more... )

Nominal rates of dietary restrictions

11:48am: MY LAPTOP'S SPEAKERS FAILED THE
TEENAGER AUDIO TEST
SEE IF YOUR EARS CAN HEAR A FREQUENCY ONLY HEARD BY YOUNG PEOPLE -
CLICK HERE
BUT BEFORE YOU GET TOO WORRIED ABOUT YOUR EARS, MAKE SURE THAT YOUR SPEAKERS CAN ACTUALLY PRODUCE IT

I was pretty suspicious when I couldn't hear it - not because I expected my ears to be undamaged - but because the other day, I tried an app that cut out at 10 kHz, and I know I can hear way higher than 10kHz.  I'm not sure what pitch this test is, but it's pretty painful.

10:27am: You can't go home
It seems you really can't return home.

MUCS was my home for eight years or more – from 1997 until around Melbourne IV; call it 2005. Deep in my mind, I loved the wall of sound that rose from the hundred voices of MUCSters.

MUCS was the first choir I loved, my sole social group for many years. It seems more like my “old home” than my parents' house, which is not that surprising, considering I spent fewer years where my parents reside now.

Nowadays, I am a Monash student. Many here would know of the difficulties that I have recently had within the Monash choir, upon which I shall not elaborate at this time. Although most of my closest friends are, or have recently been called MonUCS, these difficulties have led me to consider my options. I was -extremely- pleasantly surprised last week, by how many people so warmly welcomed me back to MonUCS, especially following some of the less than pleasant kerfuffles that happened towards the end of last year. Of course, a couple of people kept to themselves, but for the most part, it was the sort of welcome that one expects from home :)

It had been my plan to start examining some of the other choirs around, just to check if MonUCS still is the best place to call home, or whether it might be time to move on. Scots' is musically fantastic - many songs are performed completely unrehearsed (with many in the choir sightreading), but nonetheless sounding better than many choirs. I'd say the performance standard is not generally quite as high as that of Gloriana, but that's hardly surprising, given that most 16th century works are considered “easy”, and therefore performed on two hours' notice. Unfortunately, however, Scots' social dynamic is nothing like what I'd come to expect from a choir. It's more like the dynamic of a workplace, where you see your colleagues for a few hours every week (funny, that). Other Scots' choristers attest to not knowing many of the names of the colleagues with whom they have been performing for over a year.

Unfortunately, being comfortable with a musical standard that high has also been devastating on my experience of MUCS. Although I expected to find Foetus talking with unnecessary verbosity, and the teaching of the incorrect pronunciation of Nkosi and so on, I also remembered that the great thing about Foetus's rehearsal style was that he let the choir face tricky music full on, and would only then notebash the sections that weren't sounding right. Unfortunately, that mode of practice seems to have disappeared. I also didn't expect to find warmups until 7:45. And since RMPS has recently had a purge, MUCS is looking more like a retirement village than ever, with a sound to match.

(cont) Actually, the sound was a crucial part of the experience. For the first half, I sat at the back, and the sound was disappointingly weak, off, raucous - all very unsatisfying. For the second half, I moved right into the middle, and the sound-experience was far far better. Although the sound wasn't good, at least it was full. Without that, I probably would have been rather depressed at the loss of a capacity-to-experience. As it was, I was only disappointed at MUCS's capacity to deliver. I did find it curious, though, that in MonUCS, I now find I "need" to sit at the back, so as not to hear individual voices' mistakes, whereas in MUCS, I found I needed to be in the middle, so that the different rough voices could blast each other into an acceptable wash.

Elipsis

Consequently, I won't be heading to MUCS this week.

10:49pm: What der hey?
Was walking dog. Smelt smoke. "Hrmm..." thought I, "Is that from the bushfires?"

Apparently not. Since the temperature has fallen a bit, somebody decided it was obviously time to have an open fire indoors

*Facepalm*

What's the bet that three days ago, they had an air-conditioner on full blast?

8:05pm: Learning from this
I have a theory.

In the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires, more people were killed outside of their homes (esp in cars) than in. For the past 20 years, those who were properly prepared to defend their homes not only had excellent survival rates, but they had very good rates of house retention, while those that fled virtually condemned their houses to be destroyed.

That's all very well for "normal" bushfire conditions. However, footage the other day didn't show fires with smoke rising, it showed smoke moving entirely horizontally. Reports were that the fire fronts were moving at upwards of 60 kph. With speeds like that, by the time a resident might know that their area is in danger, it might be too late to flee.

I've always thought that if I were to live in a rural area, that I'd want an underground bunker. I'm starting to think that this might not be such a bad idea for everybody else. Digging out an underground bunker might be expensive, but apparently above ground bunkers can be helpful too:

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/story/0,22606,25026484-5006301,00.html

One advantage to the underground idea is that because underground structures have such thermal mass, that they'd also be pretty good for enduring the heat during heat spells etc.

Current community safety spots tend to be on ovals; some survivors report being in cars in the middle of paddocks (with some grass-fires not hot enough to set the car alight). These are certainly cheaper options, but not exactly psychologically comforting, and I doubt they'd be as effective.

The bunker idea still has several modes of failure:
* The bunker catching fire
* Something (eg: a house above, a big tree) falling on the bunker
* The heat penetrating the bunker
* Local oxygen being used up by the fire

Good design should avoid the first three failure modes. Of course, the oxygen issue could be solved to any given risk, for a price.

This is a very 1950s idea. I admit that I've always been fascinated by fallout boy shelters. But, I'm starting to think that living within crawling distance of a bunker might just be a Wise Idea, and probably worth some of the cost

6:47pm: I love my house!
Although double brick isn't nearly as good for insulation as one might think - in terms of insulation efficiency they kind of suck - I'm incredibly grateful for the amount of thermal mass our place has.

Hottest Day Evar. No Aircon.

And the only thermometer we had couldn't tell us how hot it was. It just said "Lo". Judging by the cool change, when things reached some sort of equilibrium, at a guess: About 29 in the warmer rooms, about 26 in the hallway. Not unpleasant at all.

There are things we could do better - better use of shading, use of water storage as thermal mass, and our ceiling insulation is laughable.

So, if Ruddy is serious about schilling out for free insulation, who the fuck needs an air-conditioner?

5:14pm: Make your parents proud
OK, just had to share. Smoking accessories that nobody should own.

http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/03/19/14-smoking-accessories-that-nobody-should-own/

Hattip:
http://gayaruangkepelbagaian.wordpress.com/category/creativity/

9:46pm: Hee! Will be home soon:)

I hope that everyone will be celebrating Obamamania in style back home. We're getting pretty xhausted, but it's been fabulous. And we'll be home early!! on Friday.

Love yas

8:58pm: In Australia, I would expect any "Miniature wonderland" to be aimed at a kiddie demographic, although, it was touted as "The largest model railway in the world," which I would expect might pull a lot of old men

However, given the number of children heading into the place, it was a sort of surprise to find:

* Someone puking outside a trainstation
* A red light district, including sailors chatting up whores in a brothel
* Several instances of people fucking in the wilderness
* A porn film set
* Someone masturbating in a toilet cubicle
* Someone puking in a portaloo at an outdoor rock concert

However, the only srug use that I saw any evidence of was drunkenness. Not that we really exhausted the place. It was amazingly extensive (500,000 person-hours so far), and detailed. I don't get why modellers use 1:87 scale, tho. More info, but probably not so much juice, at www.miniatur-wunderland.com

Anyway, the point of this post was to say "they do things differently here". I will hopefully follow up this post with a visual representation of this. To follow on cuddlefairy's comments to Asmodel, compare the interlinking of routes in Munich: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VerkehrsnetzMuenchen2008.png
And Hamburg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bahnlinien_im_HVV.png
With the victorian radial system

Also, unsurprisingly, different cities are very very different places.  In Munich, the S-bahn (suburban) is swish, modern and quiet, and the U-bahn (underground) is clunky, grotty, noisy, antiquated.  In Hamburg the opposite applies, except that the Underground is above ground half the time (??), and not half as nice as the nicer of the Munich trains.

5:10pm: Following on from Cuddlefairy's post about Silverster, a few more observations:

* Drunk and disorderly teenagers everywhere, and the cops apparently not batting an eyelid

* Whilst smoking has been very out of the way until now, last night there were lots of people lighting up in the underground stations. This includes cigarettes, cigars, and fireworks.

* The fireworks started intermittently in the afternoon (impatience!), were all over the place by 10pm, and were constant for a good long while into the night.

* Some of the trash was from things like overturned newspaper stands, broken display boards...

* There have been lots of emergency sirens today. Lots. Way more than I've ever experienced, staying next to hospitals or anything. This is kinda unnerving. I mean, I know that drunk children playing with fireworks is a recipe for disaster (we saw fireworks being directed INTO groups of people). But why are there so many emergencies at 4PM?

* The impromptu city trashing fireworks were extremely decentralised, and the culprits included small children, adult men, old women...

* A lot of preparations were very late. Cops setting up roadblocks at 11:20. Crowds gathering in certain spots very last-minutely.

8:28pm: Happy new year, everyone!

Sure, I know itś a little late in Melb, and a little early here, but whatever...

I send my love, and hope beach trip was lots of fun for all involved.

Ciao!

3:25pm: Well, we´re certainly getting a very non-homelike experience.

We had a few hours in Frankfurt betewwn our plane arriving (german customs: superquick, and very curt). Well before dawn. I said "lets be tourists" because with our bags and our shivering, there was not going to be any hiding the fact. The streets were deserted, and it wasn´t long before a drunk guy spotted us, and made as much of a beeline for us as his stumbling would allow, reminding us of the non-australian personal space thing, saying "Tourists, eh? Blablbablblah!" "um..." "Blah blah blah blah bla!" "I´´m sorry, I really don´t understand" "Sigh!"

After Pezzae´s build up, there was a disappoitingly large gap at the station, but it was very nice to have the ICE tick along silently without the slightest of fuss, at 210 klicks an hour.

And then we found that our lodging wasn´t quite what we expected it to be. See cuddlefair´s log. One thSince we were at their mercy, we had no option but to go with whatever food they laid out in front of us. God damnit, chicken stew is disgusting.

So, not only are we near skiable mountains; We´re UP a serious fucking mountain. In a ski lodge. Fresh snow laid this morning. Surrounded by beautiful ski runs. And no skis! *cries*

One other thing that´s not like home: Across the valley from us is a 1.5 kilometre wank!

Edit: Cuddlefairy says I sound unhappy. This is not the case at all. *is very very happy*

3:29am: Everywhere I look are little things. Hee!

Have packed.

Am excited.

We will be getting temporary prepaid sims over there. I have already neutered my phone, so all contact to my mobile is now useless.

I'm also trying to readjust my clock, but Julie requires sleep before tomorrow's long day.

:)

7:32pm: I'm having difficulty...
I'm having difficulty deciding whether I like the yellow bit or the green bit of avocado better. Some choices in life are tough.

10:32am:

So very like the car industry here. Three out of four "Australian" car manufacturers made very bad choices about what sort of vehicles they should be making here:

Mitsubishi abandoned manufacturing the Colt, and went about upsizing the Magna to the 380. They sank $600 million on it. But no-one bought it, and so despite the obscene amounts of tax benefits, state and federal government subsidy, Mitsubishi doesn't manufacture in Australia anymore.

Ford and Holden make big ugly cars that almost no-one buys for themselves. The people that buy Falcons and Commodores pay for them with other people's money - that is, about 90% of sales are to fleets. It's not surprising that when people can adopt an attitude of "I don’t have to pay for fuel, because I've got Salary Packaging," that they prefer larger vehicles. Everyone else avoids them.

Also, government buyers have policies about local content. So, they prefer to buy whatever locally manufactured vehicles are available. Since this is mostly shitty sixes, that's where the money goes.

And so, we have an industry that is entirely unsupported by consumers. If you look at the total amount of governmental support for Australian car manufacturing and so on, each automotive manufacturing job costs around $400,000.

We could do no worse, knowing governmental industry's inefficiencies, to create a nationalised car manufacturer, paid for entirely out of government coffers employing twice as many people as the automotive manufacturers, and give away the pieces of shit.

10:37am: In very boring domestic-y news:

* We know have giant mirrors of giantness. These are the sliding doors at the front of our new wardrobe, which, for the past few days, has maintained a state of order completely uncharacteristic of the tradition of everything else in this house

* Our CDs are all arranged (vaguely) alphabetically. They are also all in boxes. They will soon be put in storage, once I have ripped them all to a near-lossless compressed soft-copy form of a format yet-to-be-determined.

* This has created more shelf space for books. BOOKS! BOOKS! BOOKS!

* A lot of the structural mess of the house is being slowly dealt with. Surface mess is still an ongoing problem.

* Mapping churches takes a lot of effort. Oh, wait, that's not domestic :P

* Sneaky plans of ultrasuperkingbedness are progressing slowly, but the space is closer to the required order :)

4:28pm: A message to all subject coordinators
Most universities expect you to end up with a distribution something along the lines of

High HD/H1 (90-99%) : a few exceptional students
Normal HD/H1 (80-90%): A small but significant percentage of the class
The bulk of the students that you want passing distributed through the rest of the passing grades
Almost no-one in the 40% to 50% range **
Slackers who know something: 30% to 40%
Never attended a class: 0% to 10%

**The reason you don't want students in the 40% to 50% range is that it's just painful for everyone. It doesn't make them say "Oh, if I'd just worked a leeeettle bit harder, I'd have passed!" and then work harder next semester. It makes them bitter and pissed off that something small has fucked up (or robbed them of) a year of their life. Consequently, a lot of subject coordinators - in my eyes, generally the good ones - try to avoid giving marks that end in 9s

These mark distributions are fairly standard. They're not that hard to achieve. Most courses have been around for quite a while, and there's a lot of information about how well students know particular areas, what they find hard...

If you're running multiple courses over the same area (eg: first year advanced maths, standard first year maths, first year maths for those who need a hand up), yes, some form of scaling might be appropriate.

For all other classes - don't screw around with scaling. It just makes things distressing and awkward for everyone.

Designing an exam to achieve the distribution above IS NOT THAT FUCKING HARD. If you have many of the better students in your class coming out of the exam shaking their heads, counting their marks and expecting poor results, you have fucked up. If you then scale everything to get the appropriate distribution (like the one above), you have not solved the problem, you have addressed the symptom, and you are still shit at what you do.

If you are a junior staff member, get senior colleagues to look at your work. Exams are important to students.

So, how does one get the appropriate distribution?

(1) Cover topics with weights resembling the amount of time spent on each area during the course
(2) Ask questions on each topic with a similar difficulty to the practice questions encountered during the course.
(3) Disambiguating questions - those that distinguish the cream from the norm - should not constitute a larger portion of the marks than the amount by which you want the high achievers to be distinguished
(4) Norm-boosters or "gimmes" should cover topics that a reasonable acquaintance with the subject should make simple, but inexperience should make very difficult

Further to (2) Ask questions of moderate difficulty. Ask predominantly moderately difficult questions. They create a nice, shiny, normal distribution by simple virtue of common mistakes. Asking predominantly gimmes and doozies fucks up your distribution.

Further to (4): Just because a topic is "hard" is no reason to cover that topic only with "gimmes". Moreover, it can be counter-productive. If the topic is known to be hard, then "gimmes" are more likely to be even simpler, and can be answered by someone off the street. If questions on any topic are too simple, a moderate student is likely to interpret them as a "trick question".

( examples that are especially pertinent today )

Make the easy questions require some background. For the bulk of topics, ask some basic background questions AND ask some questions that require some working, that familiarity will make simple, but inexperience will make awkward AND OPTIONALLY some tricky "bonus" questions that allow the swots to shine.

Or, if you're only asking a couple of long questions, allow each question to show students (1) know what's involved (2) know how to deal with it (3) understand extensions and implications of the topic.

It's not that fucking hard.

3:34am: Procrasti..nah, later
Well, it's "that time of the month" again. Have completely run out of internets. Almost nothing webby is working. I'm posting this using Lynx, which is a text-only browser (and is therefore useable by the blind, with speechy tools), as LJ is certainly too heavy. It's amazing how much worse this is than dial-up was a few years back...

This would be a good thing, from the point of view of reducing procrastination from study. Not such a good thing from the point of view of finding out stuff about study. For instance, is my exam tomorrow open book, or not? Let me presume that it is, that way, when I start to open up my books during the exam, I can have plausible expression of "Oh, I thought these were prescribed materials."

Apart from that - things are generally good, specifics about study and paranoia and narapoia and such excepted.

And I'm a bit disorganised, but nothing new there.

3:12pm: *relieved*
Ahhh!

I'm unlikely to fail subject with notoriously high failure rate

*breathes again*

1:44am: Finally gets around to posting it...
-- Rex will flex --
-- Flexxy-Rex --
That Flexxy-Rex!
That Flexxy-Rex!
I do not like that Flexxy-Rex!
Do you like having anal sex?
I do not like it, Flexxy-Rex.
I don't like having anal sex.
Would you like it here or there?
I would not like it here or there.
I would not like it anywhere.
I don't like having anal sex.
I do not like it, Flexxy-Rex.
Would you like it in a bed?
( Would you like it after head?... )