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Many interesting things have happened in my life over the last 2 years. Most of these events aren't reflected here at requiem as I've let this site languish. This post is aimed at filling in the gaps.

Around 2 years ago, while still completing my PhD in Computer Science, I moved to Sydney to take up a position as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Psychology, Macquarie University. There I worked closely with Professor Bill Thompson to help establish the Music, Sound and Performance lab. While there I worked on music cognition and emotion, amusia (tone deafness), and motion capture and analysis of music performance. I enjoyed my time at the lab a great deal, and learnt a tremendous amount.

In May of 2008 I travelled to Germany to present our motion capture work at a workshop on music and synchronisation. I had a marvellous time, and met some great people along the way.

In September 2008 I was officially awarded my PhD, and I became Dr Livingstone. Shortly after this, my position at Macquarie drew to a close.

In October 2008 I moved Montreal, Canada, to take up a position as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Psychology at McGill University. Here I'm working at the Sequence Production Lab on motion capture with Canada Research Chair and professor Caroline Palmer.

Montreal is an amazing and beautiful place, full of culture and character. I think the next two years are going to be ones to remember.

It's finally over. After nearly 4 years and two topics, a few minutes ago I officially submitted my PhD to UQ.

My recently submitted doctoral thesis discusses CMERS - a Computational Music Emotion Rule System for the control of perceived musical emotions, that modifies a musical work at the levels of score and performance in real-time. I researched, designed, programmed, and tested CMERS, which handles all modifications to the musical work. CMERS achieves a change in perceived musical emotion through the application of music-emotion rules; these rules quantify the empirically observed relations between musical features and specific emotions (for example, major mode ≈ happy, minor mode ≈ sad).

The Chaser's executive producer Julian Morrow will be on ABC Classic FM tomorrow from 10-11am, hosted by Jennifer Byrne. The long-running program is similar to Enough Rope.

An investigation into police officers who removed their name badges during the Saturday 8th APEC protest have been cleared, citing the badges compromised the safety of the officers as they could be used against them. This is despite protesters claiming that many of the officers wore badges attached with velcro. The clearing comes after public criticism that name tags were removed so that the officers could not be identified.

Human Rights Monitors member Dale Mills took over 200 photographs [2] of officers with removed name badges. The Sydney Morning Herald [2] reports that a video clip taken by Drew Bowie has one officer saying "It's one of the policies the bosses have this week".

I find the explanation given by officers to be false, deliberately misleading, and illogical. There are a number of reasons this:

1. It would be extremely difficult to remove a name tag during a scuffle with a strong, well-equipped officer.
2. The pins in the name tag would have to be bent 90 degrees in order to be used as a stabbing weapon. This could not happen during a scuffle.
3. If the pins were on a hinge, they would need to be rotated out 90 degrees and held at that angle. This highly dexterous task could not be achieved during a scuffle.
4. Removing an officer's pin would be just as difficult as unclipping and removing any of the officer's other weapons. It would illogical for a protester to go for such an ineffective weapon
5. The pin metal is too weak and prone to bending to be an effective weapon
6. There are far more dangerous implements that could be used as weapons: rocks, rings, protester poster sticks.
7. Officers were not searching protesters, as indicated by officers being hit by darts and an iron bar. If the use of weapons was a concern, protesters would have been more carefully inspected.
8. If this was a valid concern, police badges used in normal street duties would have been replaced with velcro substitutes prior to this. The long-standing practise of retention security on police belts indicates this policy.

Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione originally stated that "There are times when officers might lose those badges in a scuffle." However, as the protests were largely peaceful, it became apparent that this could not be the case for so many officers. The linked video is soft and of low-quality. It would need to undergo forensic video analysis for it to be taken seriously.

Today I attended the largest of the anti-APEC protest rallies to hit the streets of Sydney. Estimates of attendees [2] have been put between 3,000 to 10,000, with 6,000 being the most likely number.
 

Not Happy John - mums and dads on the streets of Sydney

The march was peaceful and virtually without incident. Marching from Town Hall down to Hyde Park, the procession was slow but boisterous. The protesters were comprised mainly of students, and mums and dads, standing in stark contrast to the police force that was on display. During the walk I kept flicking my gaze skyward, running my eyes across the rooftops looking for snipers and spotters, as has been reported. More than once I noticed people looking down at us. When they saw me looking, they quickly popped back out of sight. It was a comforting thought knowing that there were probably a half-dozen high-powered sniper rifles aimed at us at any one time.

The police message was clear: intimidation through overwhelming force. Police put the protest numbers at 3,000 while stating their own force numbered at 3,500. Their demeanour was cold, unhelpful, and overtly dismissive - most likely under orders not to engage with protesters in order to maintain the tangible power distinction. As the protest moved down George Street, an enormous convoy of police consisting riot trucks, attack dogs, the expensive new water cannon, and rows of riot police formed behind us.

Show of force 

The Chaser's War on Everything stars Chas Licciardello and executive producer Julian Morrow have been detained by police after staging a fake motorcade through Sydney during APEC.  Using the motorcade, the crew were able to penetrate the security zone surrounding the Intercontinential hotel where President George W. Bush is staying.

The pair had been detained but not charged over the incident. The fake convoy had been dressed to mimic the official Canadia, though Chris Taylor stated there was no particular motivation for this decision. The Chaser stars have a history of trouble with the police, much to the delight of their audience.

The Washington Post is discussing the results of a US government disease "myths & facts"prevention advertising program. The commercial is styled exactly the same as the Australian Government's Workplace Reform (Work Choices) ad series. Unfortunately for both, the commercials have the opposite of the desired effect. Just three days after viewing the US commerical, participants believed that 40% of the myths stated in the ad were factual. The fatal mistake made in both these campaigns was ignoring the psychology of repetition.

The peculiar nature of this phenomenon first came to popular attention with a quote attributed to Joseph Goebbls "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." Whether the statement repeated is true or false does not seem to matter, what counts is how many times it is repeated. Over the last few years there has been a slew of research pointing to the importance of repetition in people believing a statement as fact [1, 2].

Repetition and the Big Lie propaganda technique, first discussed by Hitler in Mein Kampf, has been used extensively by the current White House administration. Its most forceful proponent is Dick Cheney who today still maintains the following associations are synonymous - Iraq, Al Qaeda, 9-11, WMD's. He perpetuates these myths even after the associations 'Iraq 9-11', 'Iraq Al Qaeda', 'Iraq WMD' long ago had been repeatedly dismissed as false by the CIA and many others.

US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has resigned his post. Mired in scandal, Gonzales' resignation brings to a close one of the most politically embarrassing issues of the White House administration. The controversy centred around the illegal and politically motivated firings of eight US attorneys by the White House, which I wrote about earlier. You can watch the famous clip in which Jon Stewart attacks Gonzales here.

Operator: Hello, National Security Hotline

Alert but not alarmed Caller: Ah yeah hi, I'd ah ... I'd like to report some suspicious activity. That terrorist hotline commercial, it's been on television a lot lately, kind of a spike in activity. I think ... I think they must be planning for something.

One of the hot topics floating around the Internet this week is Virgil Griffith's wikipedia scanning tool. The tool operates by scanning through the volumes of wikipedia edits, and tracing back the IP's that made them.

As anyone who has edited/vandalised a Wikipedia page before knows, Wiki keeps a permanent and detailed log of all edits, and the computer IP addresses that made them. An IP address is essentially the computer equivalent of a phone number, it's unique and traceable. Given the growth and presence of Wikipedia, the creation of an aggregate tracing scanner was only a matter of time.

Given the technical detail of IP's, it's not surprising that companies and individuals within Fox news, Diebold, the BBC, and US congressional offices would be caught out. However, for officers within the Central Intelligence Agency to be caught out, officers whose first function is "obtaining and analyzing information", is laughable. So laughable that the "IA" in CIA might stand for something else.

In some cases, such as the BBC, Wikipedia edits are relatively innocuous and the act of individuals. But in the cases of Fox news, Diebold, and some US congressmen, it illustrates a systematic program of deception and propaganda. What is perhaps most worrying is that the fundamental task of two of these institutions is truth and integrity.

Of course the appearance of the scanner is only a minor setback for these companies and institutions. Circumventing the Wikipedia scanner can be easily achieved if anonymity software is used, such as TOR or a non-transparent proxy, which I discussed two years ago.

Top White-House aide Karl Rove, seen by many as the brains behind George W. Bush, has announced he will step at the end of August. Reviled by democrats, loved by Republicans, Karl Rove leaves behind a considerable political legacy in his shadowy political manipulations for a "permanent republican majority".

In his 2004 election acceptance speech, Bush referred to him simply as "the architect". "Everyone in the room knew what that meant," says Washington Post reporter Mike Allen. "He was the architect of the public policies that got them there, he was the architect of the campaign platform, he was the architect of the fundraising strategy, he was the architect of the state-by-state strategy, he was the architect of the travel itinerary. His hand was in all of it." You can read more at the PBS timeline of Karl Rove.

The duduk is a double reed wind instrument from Armenia, first thought to have appeared around 3000 years ago. Notoriously difficult to play, the duduk has a beautiful haunting sound and has been growing in popularity with Western film composers. A few months back you may recall my interest in purchasing a duduk.

Well yesterday morning my duduk arrived. Crafted by hand from aged apricot wood, I picked up one in the diatonic scale of A from duduk.com. I've decided to create a video diary of my progress, with the first instalment coming after my first day of practise. Never having played a reed instrument before, I found the first few minutes rather challenging.

Hello everybody, it seems requiem has been down for the past week, my apologies to you all. I was unaware of the error as my page cache wasn't updating; that is, I was always seeing the page copy from one week ago. Thanks go out to Darragh for alerting me to requiem's technical issues.