I thought Jay Rosen provided a good analysis of the media’s role both in the election and more generally on ABC’s Lateline.

I have also been thinking how the political system could be improved to be more representative of the entire population. Like many, I have been frustrated with the issues that have become the focus of this election, and hate seeing politicians so blatantly targeting marginal seats in both policies and funding. I came up with two possibilities:

• Remove compulsory voting; or
• Move to proportional representation in the lower house.

Removing compulsory voting would mean that candidates need to give voters across the nation a reason to come and vote. But I like the idea of compulsory voting – it encourages people to engage in politics and voice their opinion, so I will discount this option here.

Proportional voting would mean all voters directly elect the leader. This is in contrast to the current system of electing a local representative, and the party or coalition with the greatest number of representatives leads the nation.

It seems most people think we already have proportional representation. In all of the media I have seen people talk about voting for Julia or Tony. But if I were a resident of Wentworth I would be torn – I think Malcolm Turnbull is a valuable member of both the parliament and the Liberal party, but I am not prepared to see Tony Abbott as PM. If we used the same voting system as for the senate I could preference Malcolm much higher than his party leader.

One of the big fears is with proportional representation will lead to a hung parliament. I do not see this as a problem. It is rare that Australians give one party control of both houses of parliament, and when we do a change of government is imminent. So in effect we almost always have a hung parliament and seem to survive. Ultimately parliament should represent the people – and if a proportional representation system allows peoples opinions to be more accurately reflected this must be a good thing for democracy.

The potential bigger problem is that this would remove local representation from parliament – to whom do you petition your cause? Again I do not see this as a major problem. There should still be representatives interested in your vote and your cause.

The great problem with proportional representation is that it would erode the power of both of the major parties. Thus it will not happen.

The recipe is surprisingly simple – the only ingredients are ginger, lime, sugar and water. The most time consuming part was roughly peeling the ginger with all its lumps and bumps.

Tim was correct when he said the recipe is spicy and gives you a kick. Both Oziel and I both watered it down to drink. We agreed it would be good mixed with carbonated water or a Lemon Loka (carbonated water with a twist of lemon and no sugar).

We thought that replacing the lime juice with lemon juice would also help reduce the impact of the “kick.

The post that first caught my attention was pasta with fresh corn pesto. And that is what Oziel and I made for dinner tonight. This is our attempt below.

We were very happy with the result. The recipe makes about four serves.

The other post that caught my attention was ginger beer. We also made that tonight, but haven’t had a glass yet as we want it ice-cold (so no photos).

I love ginger beer but, like salt and vinegar chips, it is one of the things that hasn’t taken off in Sweden. It is possible to buy from Gray’s American Store in Malmö. Gray’s sells supermarket goods from around the English speaking world that are otherwise hard to find in Sweden. They even sell Tim Tams for the bargin basement price of 9.20 AUD per pack!! However, all of their Cadbury chocolate comes from the UK =(

But I am not sure I can be bothered to go and vote. It’s not the train fare, we were thinking of going to Copenhagen anyway. And it’s not that I am registered to vote in a seat so safe that Volvo is looking at using the technology in its next car. It’s that I am so disillusioned with politics – even if I cast the deciding vote I am not satisfied with the difference it will make.

Politics has become a career. There is no room for ideology as the political corporations seek market dominance. Political ideology is no longer a vision for the nation, it is about ensuring a sufficient number of votes market dominance in a sufficient number of electorates markets.

To facility change in Australian politics today, you need to be part of a focus group. You don’t need any qualification – from my observation it actually helps not to have them. No, this is more like a psychologists couch – you vent your fears and prejudices. Then the political corporations roll them into their product offerings. How else can someone explain to me why 2000 people coming by boat to seek refuge from unwarranted persecution can be blamed for trafic delays in Sydney?!

We need leadership. Leaders shape opinions and beliefs. They don’t just follow them.

I was pleased to see on the issue of adoption by same-sex partners that the Swedish politicians lead public opinion, rather than waited for it to catch up with their own beliefs. When introduced, adoption by same-sex partners was only supported by 17% of the nation, but eight years later it is supported by a majority of the Swedish nation. They did what they thought was right and took the nation forward with them.

I recommend you listen to the discussion on Late Night Live from 4 August 2010.

God isn’t the meat in life’s sandwich, god is the sandwich.

Laurie Santos had much more fun with this topic, conducting behavioural economics experiments based on prospect theory with monkeys. Her aim was to see if our biases are deeply innate, or just bad habits we learn. Her conclusion was that a monkey economy is as irrational as our own. Or, as I prefer to say, that software engineers make the same mistakes as monkeys.

Laurie’s presentation at TED is far more engaging than ours, so I include it here …

Maybe this is why they call me monkey?!

For lunch Oziel and I headed to Max Burger. They have new self-service terminals for ordering, much like the self check-in terminals at the airport.

To our surprise, no one else used these terminals while we were eating our lunch – preferring the queue. But it turned out that these were even better than we expected:

• There was no queue for the terminals, while the queues for ordering with a cashier were at least six people deep.
• We could order by picture – meaning the cashier didn’t get confused with our Swedish.
• We were given many more options than we knew existed (eg. swap chips out for salad, carrots, potato gratin, etc …)
• After ordering we went to the express counter to pick up our meal and it was almost ready (fast food in Swedish is not known for being fast).

We give the Max self-service terminals the thumbs up.

One of the most common ways to stumble across my blog is by people doing image searches for kangaroo meat. The other picture that gets far too many hits is the one below. I can’t help but think those searching for Swedish sluts are disappointed.

In the past month my site has been translated into Chinese 49 times with Google Translate. 你好.

The most popular post from the archives is on how I fixed the sound problems on my HP Mini 2140 after I installed Ubuntu. Most people find this post through various Google searches, and it has been translated into Spanish 16 times in the last month. This pleases me as none of the people I know who regularly read my my blog have one of these computers.

There are also a lot of searches about people learning to drive in Sweden in English. I hope these people have a more positive experience than I had. But ultimately this ended well.

Far too many people use Internet Explorer (and old version at that). I hope this is some anomoly of the spambots, amd that the rest of you have found your way to Chrome or just something other than Internet Explorer.

And for some reason my honours thesis has hundreds of downloads!? Much more than all of my other publications combined. Of all of the things I have written I would have thought this to be one of the less interesting, if for no other reason than it is the longest, and my Euromicro 2006 paper provides an eight page summary.

Almost all of these messages come from eastern Europe. Many are in Russian. The spambots mainly seem to attack a small number of posts with a couple of messages each day. I have played around with some of these posts, and the spambots still try to comment on posts after they have been removed – so they must be automated in some way.

To date I have been using Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam, this is why you had to type in some distorted word in when commenting. While it initially worked well, in the past couple of months it has been letting far too much through. I tried changing the captcha words list, but this was to no avail. Further I had complaints that this raised the barrier to posting legitimate comments to far.

Next I turned on Akismet. I should have done this from the beginning, it has stopped all of the spam and let through all of the real comments. But I still wasn’t happy – the spambots were still sending messages for me to moderate.

Next I thought it would be better if I only allowed comments from authenticated users. Given how much I hate passwords and that people complained about the captcha words, I wanted an OAuth solution, like that used by TripIt.

I found and installed Janrain, which allows people to register with a couple of by authenticating against Google, Facebook, Yahoo or WordPress before commenting. This also allowed me to get rid of the captcha word.

In the hours since setting this up I haven’t had any of the expected spam – but only time will tell how good this solution is. I’ll keep you posted.