A long day

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Marvelling at the Sun’s beauty again, I realise, my commute extended from dawn til dusk.

With a 7am departure, a peaking sliver of pink peach rose to my right. Along the journey, a tall sky inhaled it up to a full circle of orange.

My 8pm return, the same peach – once more on my right – descending and nestling into slumber.

13 hours have passed, and I’m satisfied. I have done all I could for this day.

Condoning the Gaps

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Today Australia’s Productivity Commission released their scathing annual report on the lack of progress and multiple failings in Closing the Gap in inequality experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (Guardian Australia (2024), Closing the Gap will fail without ‘fundamental change’, scathing report finds).

This is the anti-Voice landscape we now live in.

Indigenous disadvantage, conditions and health outcomes not improving. Governments criticised for not listening or incorporating knowledgeable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the process.

It’s disappointing to see the ongoing failure in this report. What’s more disappointing is an identified strategy in the Indigenous Voice to Parliament took aim at resolving some of these issues, but not given a chance.

For those who said A Voice would achieve nothing, well, doing nothing new has achieved nothing also.

Review: Gotta Get Theroux This

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Gotta Get Theroux This
Gotta Get Theroux This: My Life and Strange Times in Television written by Louis Theroux
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A fascinating backstory, and journal of process and progression from someone I think I always admired. Louis’s humble and raw account of his major accomplishments encouraged me to watch and rewatch several of the documentaries he recounts in entertaining and educational detail. I don’t often finish a book of this length, let alone within a month!

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Smells like pre-teen spirit

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I saw that my local council added what looks like a painted edge over the encroaching grass that has begun growing onto the loose gravel footpaths. I presume they had used this to poison the grass into complying with their urban landscaping aesthetics and order.

It’s uncanny and a little unnerving how identical the poison’s aroma was with the smell of permanent marker pen that my primary school classmates and I used to sneakily love to sniff when the teacher wasn’t watching.

Bike Safety

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I’ve been sitting in a local car park, which is opposite the police station. 95% of the kids riding bikes are not wearing helmets.

Kind of interesting to be watching this, and then see a memory pop up from social media today on a similar theme, from COVID hangover times – 16 January 2022.

I checked out the original post again, cause I thought it stirred up quite a few feelings among my Facebook friends at the time. LOL, yep (on top of the 22 reactions):

Movie reviews collection

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I really enjoy a good movie experience (sometimes that can even involve bad movies). Thanks to IMDb I have a growing record of all my more than 200 ratings. And on Twitter I often share what I think about the more noteworthy movies or series I watch. My summaries really don’t conform with regular reviews, partly due to a Tweet having a limited number of characters, which I think is a lot more fun. Here’s the definitive archive of Ryan’s movie reviews for your info – and to prevent me from starting to watch something again by mistake.

The list is sorted by most recently watched/reviewed, not when it was released. You can filter by choosing Genre and/or Star rating.

Perhaps my tongue-in-cheek comment about Willis’s unwise decision to be part of this movie could be in bad taste. As it turns out, his declining mental state has been quietly known about for some time.

Hard to believe it’s 30 years since Romper Stomper was infamously released. Now we’re living in Victoria I finally got around to watch it – immediately recognising the Richmond train station subway and Point Addis finale. Kind of an important story still here, regardless of its age.

https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/1279766036854652929
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/1273939208436985856
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/1269350908581666818
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/1263789716073140225
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/1261666544670531584
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/1260896832307130369
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/1218395908036915201
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/1249797497486061573
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/1208708310943223808
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/1150002581797625856
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/1050997333754818561

https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/1032018268373045248
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/1030525022782345218
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/899248590677098497
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/847896425761394688
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/693334463384653824
https://twitter.com/rbrink77/status/624522343092613120

There IS such a thing as data, Benedict Evans

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Again I was drawn to Benedict Evans’ emphatic statement that there is no such thing as data (There’s no such thing as data — Benedict Evans (ben-evans.com)). In this essay, Benedict challenges the present infatuation with data, claiming that in practice, data’s value is ineffectual, even bordering on the irrelevant.

He first succeeded at baiting my click with an episode of the same title on his Another Podcast with Toni Cowan-Brown (11 January 2021). Back then I think I surmised their argument is that data gets complicated with ownership and differing source systems, so it’s not worth worrying about too much. In this more recent essay though, perhaps the crux of the argument is more simple.

I was actually hoping that this topic would be in a similar vein to Professor Tom Wilson’s 2002 academic paper, The nonsense of ‘knowledge management’ – which was very formative in my early days of data and information management. In that paper, the professor argued quite successfully that the term KM was little more than a blurring of lines with information management. And that blurring was due to the information field no longer being sexy enough for management consultants and platform roadmaps.

Mr Evans though has come from very different stock, from largely telco market analysis and tech venture capital & industry trends. So it’s unsurprising he (quite sensibly) may have never thought of the discipline of data and information management as sexy.

I didn’t tweak this point at the time. Maybe I assumed due to half a dozen years of appreciating Benedict Evans’ content on Twitter – and as a subscriber to his newsletter for the past couple, that I would always agree with everything he says. Until now this position has held true for topics I don’t remotely understand. And perhaps this is why I immediately bit at this apparent reheating of a position that data (a topic I’ve had two decades of involvement with) is all nonsense.

https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1532632592658440194

Benedict was more clear, and correct in his reply. I was hung up with how things were phrased, rather than the accuracy of the claim. To begin an essay with the dismissive premise was actually a wonderful prompt to spark the attention of a student and practitioner of data, information, and architecture. The master stroke however was to go on to say it isn’t worth anything. I of course figured this to mean the personal, intrinsic and ongoing value that our data retains. I found, however, it most probably reflects the kind of returns that a venture capital lens would expect to see in a portfolio.

This point is developed further in the essay, claiming that our Instagram posts mean very little. A quick learner, I tried re-reading this as they mean “very little commercially”. But people aren’t interested in the commercialisation of their data. Quite the opposite. (Although we’ll all have a problem with non-viable platforms if no one is profiting.) Benedict views Instagram likes as “not [being] your ‘my’ data or ‘your’ data alone, and it’s not worth much without the context of all the other likes and follows.” This doesn’t sound like a problem of data not existing, or nonsense. It sounds like much more data exists than we originally conceived, and its ownership and management is complicated.

Similarly for likes on other social media platforms. Adding TikTok and PageRank into this same discussion, he sees “the value isn’t in the ‘data’ at all but in the flow of activity around it”. Yet it somehow omits that this flow of activity is captured, of course, in data. Then it steps further to consider those data streams of human interactions to not be restricted just to the world of the living. He challenges us to see these phenomena as mechanical Turks. I read this as data represents human activity, therefore, like other human processes we can automate without humans, and with scale. I worry what kind of future that will be. They are systems – it correctly highlights – but they’re human systems. By default those will always compose and present human data.

But back to the definitions used. I’m not sure we started with a valid foundation when it begins with “‘data’ is not one thing, but innumerable different collections of information.” Data is generally about one thing, and collections of it progresses to information with adding a context. It’s through context, we can understand. It’s not the other way around. There is little to no value in the isolated values of spreadsheet columns, but if we know the rows represent a highly sensitive context, the overall information asset which is produced has a clearer value and can certainly be leveraged to produce greater insights.

The contrary example the essay used here was combining wind turbine telemetry with specific public transport events. Their unhelpful correlation is pretty obvious. That’s not the fault of data, but the juxtaposition of two completely different contexts. Data relates to things (or events/entities). So very different “things” will rarely have a useful relationship between their data. What can be notable, and perhaps is undersold here (and oversold in plenty of industries) is how the advances in AI can bring potential in inferring and identifying causal relationships between disparate data. Such links may be inconceivable and inaccessible to the capabilities and capacity of human analysis.

Not to stop there, Evans asserts the “uselessness of common assertions” with an interesting example that routing insights from delivering large volumes of restaurant orders may not assist missile guidance systems. I hope not! (Although I think we’ve been through the idea of borrowing military hardware to deliver food.) My view again is that data is merely an atomic representation of the thing. It’s not a useful or achievable goal to make a single pool of all and everything we know about everything in an understandable (let alone actionable) way. For the reasons of analysis, many relatable (but not all) data sets can be brought together for wider insights. At the level of enterprises, data lakes aim to be that comprehensive repository of respective insight. I say respective, because it will still be based on a context of how, and for what, it was collected; and thereby how it might and might not be used. Even climate change won’t boil the ocean quick enough for arbitrary links to be made between everything and everything. And despite Benedict raising the challenge and nonsense of such an activity, I’m not sure that anyone is explicitly asserting they can and will.

The essay ended with a summary comparing the current AI and data concerns, with previous generational concerns associated during the early adoption of databases. It argues that the risks didn’t live up to the concerns of that time. So we shouldn’t worry now about topics of National or strategic data. Maybe Benedict’s position is indeed accurate, but the question will remain who is making most value from key data sets. Data exists everywhere, and vast arrays of data at scale with advanced analytics can tell us things we didn’t know before.

Any new insights that are generated can be used exploitatively before regulators can catch up. Surely this should all be handled with care, which is best done by appreciating its true value. So I like to think, even at a non-macro level, data is somewhat more than a nonsense or in fact not non-existent.

To conclude, I really like the referenced Tim O’Reilly macro quote that ‘data isn’t oil – it’s sand’. But I also like a competing value proposition by kids author & broadcaster, Michael Rosen, in the form of a poem called Words Are Ours. [laughing emoji didn’t work here]

Review: On The Chin

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On The Chin
On The Chin written by Alex McClintock
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Don’t know where I even learned of this book, but I’m so glad it was on my list for so long, and that I’ve now read it.

A masterpiece from start to end, it’s my ideal type of story. Weaving a personal tale of achievement with respectable self-deprecation, and a fond recall of the history and essence of a sport – one that every uninitiated person has an opinion on. Alex doesn’t hide the unflattering and worrying side of boxing.

It’s all clearly described with balance, with the added authority of someone who has gone a few rounds, but didn’t need to.

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Review: Too Much Lip

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On The Chin
Too Much Lip written by Melissa Lucashenko
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Getting through this story may have taken me several library loans and renewals. But definitely entertaining and thrilling throughout. Loved the characters, despite their flaws – even recognised quite a few. Life is gritty, life is rarely a complete fairytale. As I say (or maybe it was Wesley Snipes): Always bet on black.

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Review: Dark Emu

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Dark Emu
Dark Emu written by Bruce Pascoe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I think everyone should read this amazing book. Dark Emu is filled with fascinating well-referenced revelations, to shed light on a contrary view of pre-colonised Australia. Our Aboriginal ancestors may have been more than primitive nomadic hunter-gatherers to have survived so well for 10,000s of years. Sadly that logic and the accounts from original white settlers has proven too much of a shock to some.

It’s quite a poignant time to complete Pascoe’s book. I read it amid the Australian Federal Police’s enquiry and rejection to a (Federal MP endorsed) claim that Bruce is a fraud and no true Aboriginal. We’re also in a time of unprecedented bush fires, where Bruce has been volunteering on the front-line to save his community.

Tomorrow is Australia Day, or Invasion Day depending on your viewpoint. My wish is that the detractors, who aim to quash an Australia or history which doesn’t align with their comfortable narrative, could open their eyes and read a book like Dark Emu.

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