Banksy’s Refugee Boat protest at Glastonbury drew fire from a number of corners of the political and media spectrum. Across the board it was evident that everyone missed the point.
The raft (containing dummies and emblazoned with an iconic image) was launched into the crowd during the Idles song Danny Nedelko. No one, including the band, knew this was initiated by Banksy.
In this, the audience becomes an unwitting participant as the raft is ‘body surfed’ over the heads of the crowd who clearly think that this is part of the bands performance.
It was denounced as ‘vile’ by the British Home Secretary and branded as ‘middle class self indulgence’ and ‘tasteless lazy liberalism’ by MSM. However for my money it appears that Banksy hit the target, viz public and political sentiment around the issue of ‘boat people’ and ‘asylum seekers’ at point blank range.
Have we, the public, become the unwitting means by which the media and political machinations ensure that the issue of asylum and those seeking it, is an issue forever circulating in the divisive realms of ‘personal opinion’ and public speculation, dooming those who seek to escape various dire situations and risk their lives undertaking perilous journeys in overloaded and often less than sea worthy vessels only to die at sea or face an often hostile reception or incarceration on reaching their destination.
It must be the season for bitching. Out of the frying pan and into the fire or so it seems to go.
I’ve been driving since I was eight years old; that’s over 60 years at an easy stretch, with over 50 of those as a a licenced driver. Coming home from Harrington Park, heading west on the Great Western Hwy, I encounter a driver at Faulconbridge drifting into the left lane (about half a car width) on a number of occasions between Faulconbridge and Linden. I decide to keep a safe distance and not make any attempt to overtake on the left in case they drift into me. Passing ‘Martin Place’ on the left and heading up into a series of bends before the run down to Linden Station the driver in question pulls in to the left lane behind another vehicle. I decide to overtake and put some distance between myself and the driver. I pass the vehicle concerned and must have all but cleared it when there’s an almighty bang somewhere behind me. The car is pushed to the right but corrects without too much intervention.
I look for a safe place to pull over to find out what’s happened and find another driver pulling in behind me. We are at the time stopped near or on the driveway to “Linden Manor” 789 Great Western Hwy at Linden.
I exchange my details with the driver of the other car and take photographs of the damage to the vehicles and the other drivers number plate. At that point the other driver has not offered up anything other than their name, suburb of residence and who they are insured with. I take this as a normal shock response. The driver asks for my email. Mindful of where we are parked and that the traffic is getting heavier I suggest the driver takes my phone number and txt’s through their details as soon as they can. Yes’ I’m a trusting soul.
At fault vehicle
My vehicle. Left side passenger door and rear left pane. l
In the light of day part of the damage looks like this (see below) The black marks are rubber from the other vehicle drivers side front tyre. This is how I was able to gauge the drivers angle of turn from the left lane.
Other views.
There’s no further communication from the other driver until the evening of the following day; txt arrives, with all relevant details. So i have roughly what I need to proceed with a claim to get the damage repaired. On the drive home I’m thinking that I’ll have to check the Tesla’s onboard cameras to see if anything was recorded in relation to the impact. As it turns out, there wasn’t, another learning curve for the taking. So my third accident in over 50 years of driving; all of them not my fault. My wife asks me if I have reported the accident, I answer in the negative and find myself thinking that I probably should see what the procedures are.
And so begins my ‘dreadlock holiday’ The website for reporting isn’t user friendly, I can’t enter an acceptable time either in standard format or 24hr format. When I eventually sort the glitch out and submit the relevant details, the following appears.
I was also unable to report the accident.
Because the driver of the other vehicle was neither drunk or under the influence of drugs, both vehicles were able to be driven away etc, I was not eligible to submit an ‘online accident report’
Back to the elephant in the room.
The thought of waiting for hours trying to get through to 1300 108 187 made the drive down to NRMA Springwood a very appealing proposition.
Service was pretty prompt. I explained my situation only to be told that they don’t deal with accident claims and it had to be online or over the phone. I recounted my online experience and the person assisting me said, I can put you through directly. Within 5 minutes I was talking to a very able and proficient and clearly experienced operator.
Story down and done. By the time I got home in my inbox was a message from NRMA with my claim reference, excess waived, repairer assigned and booked. All good until………….Wednesday June 5th.
I receive a letter on June 5th, from NRMA dated 27th May, addressed to someone I don’t know in relation to an accident that happened at an unspecified time simultaneously in NSW and Victoria at Lawson with a NSW postcode. It proceeds with the normal form letter blather until we arrive here.
“Whilst our clients vehicle was involved in this incident, it was reported to Police as stolen. As such, our insured has no liability for the actions of the thief and NRMA are therefore unable to consider your claim further”
Now what has to be remembered is that;
I didn’t submit a claim until 4 days after this letter was sent. To whom do they refer..“NRMA are therefore unable to consider your claim further”
“…no liability for the actions of the thief.” The person I spoke to at the scene of the accident was the driver of the car involved (not an alleged thief ) who later, when I brought this to their attention, said they made no such statement and contacted NRMA to request they issue a correction, which they did, (another story).
Clearly no human agency was involved in the drafting of the first letter. It’s not possible for someone to make such glaring mistakes. Are they using AI supported software? I’d put money on it, because clearly an intelligent person would have picked up the discrepancy in relation to having information about the identity of “the insured”, the address of the other driver (me) and the date of the accident and the fact that there was an accident to begin with. What a thoughtful and obliging thief. Fancy going to all the trouble of stopping at the scene of the accident, getting the other drivers details, so that you could pass it onto the owner. How does the thief know who the owner is and where they live, their telephone number and email address as well as their insurer and do the exceptional thing of processing the damage claim for them whilst still in the possession of their vehicle. Only AI can bugger things up to this degree.
Note that the last two paragraphs are in conflict with each other; are we looking at information from two separate / disparate claims?
“……so we can consider your claim further”
“……are therefore unable to consider your claim further”
The original letter did not contain an “Incident Description” form so I had to figure out another way to get the accident details to the insurer of the other driver (also my insurer). So I prepare a web document with all the details ie., photographs, diagrams and notes etc. This was emailed to motorclaims@nrma.com.au on 11/6/24 with the insured’s claim number in the the ‘subject’ and my claim number in the body of the email along with the web link to the Adobe document I’d prepared.
I received no acknowledgement or reply to the issues dealt with.
On the 6/6/24 I texted the driver of the other vehicle and sent a copy of the letter I’d received asking if they knew anything about the vehicle they were driving as being reported stolen and the inference being that they were not the driver at the time of the accident.
They replied that they were not aware that NRMA had made these claims on their behalf and that they themselves did not report the vehicle as stolen and despite the inference to the contrary that they were the driver at the time of the accident. The following week I receive an amended letter from NRMA with the part about the vehicle being reported stolen retracted and in typical fashion, written as if nothing to the contrary had ever happened.
However, with this 2nd letter, the accident / accidents (was there another that I don’t know about?) takes place at two locations …….” whose vehicle was damaged on 21 May at Woodford and Hazelbrook WOODFORD, NSW, 2778…..” Now Woodford and Hazelbrook are 2.9 kilometers apart, it’s a bit hard to mistake one place for the other and the letter does not say “between” it says ‘AT’ both places. Good heavens this information is supposed to be coming from a professional organisation; however……
This put the claimed location of the accident 3.5 to 6.9 km from where it actually happened. Outside of the claim that “information presently in our possession would appear to indicate….” blah blah blah that I was the at fault driver, the letter continues in standard form and for the first time contains the ‘Incident Description Form’. It’s not perfect in terms of the purpose it’s meant to serve but it will do. Filled out and posted (Express) 18/6/24.
Coming back to this “information presently in our possession would appear to indicate….” what does this mean? details are? ……well for sure I haven’t been told and most likely won’t. My partner / wife guessed it well, she said they’ll probably try to blame you and say something like you went across in front of her” and then laughed hysterically “F#$k they’d have to be idiots to believe that, the damage to your car wouldn’t look like that”
So for the folks at NRMA here’s what the front drivers side wheel looks like when someone is veering or turning to the right. You can’t get rubber from someones tyre onto the body of your car unless their wheel is turned at least like this. What’s the inference here? Yes’ you guessed it: the driver of the white Mazda was “headed in the ‘right;’ direction 😏”
Because if they are not turning or veering right the wheel is inside the body of the car.
Unless they’re driving Formula One.
Lessons for Tesla drivers, myself, and others
As I discovered, all too late, Tesla’s Dashcam (all four cameras) are automatically engaged whenever reverse or drive is selected. In all the years I’ve had the car I’d never even looked at it. So it’s recording whenever the car is being driven.
The system only records the last hour of driving and then begins to overwrite the stored data. So in the event of something happening make sure to remove the USB before the overwrite begins, or conversely keep a few formatted USB’s in the car and swap them out whenever something happens that you need evidence for.
Dashcam and Sentry files are big, anywhere up to 30GB. Offload them to a computer and then advisably to external storage.
Blast your horn and yes, the system will record and store discrete footage, usually only about 10 secs.
If you’re not injured and are able, lots of mobile photos, not just of damage to vehicles, but location prompts e.g., street views in both directions, nearby buildings or landmarks visible from where you are standing, the accident site from as many viewpoints as it’s safe to do so because in the event of a dispute, it’s good to be able to prove where you were.
This is an unusual thing for me to do but under the circumstances, probably a necessity. The reason being that;
EdConnect has no category for this type of complaint and
There is too much information to permit submission via an online request. So reducing it to a URL makes that task a lot easier.
On the 9th of April ’23 I received this email from IDM_NoReply@det.nsw.edu.au informing me of the following. (see image) Under normal circumstances, and; if the information contained in the email was correct, there would be no problem. However, this mail notification is riddled with some serious errors that spell out loudly and clearly that certain processes within the DoE are basically up the creek.
I have been with the Dept of Education for over 27 years, (Visual Art, Photography & Visual Design). Of those, between 1997 and 2020 were as a full time member of staff. I retired from full time teaching in May 2020 after undergoing a quadruple bypass in December 2018. I retained my employment status (unbroken) with the Dept and have worked as a relief teacher on and off for the last 4 years. My DoE email address has been the same for the last 27 years.
Unravelling the mess.
“During your time as a casual staff member of the NSW Department of Education, an email account was provided to you for carrying out business related duties on the basis that it would expire fifteen months from the date of your last pay”
So firstly; no conditional email account was provided to me. I simply continued using the one I had been using for the last 23 years. In the email from the DoE (May 2020) notifying me of my “approval to teach’ as a relief / casual teacher no mention was made that my current email address would at any time expire under the conditions mentioned in the email in question. Had I been resigning from the DoE it would be a foregone conclusion that my DoE email would cease to be operational along with access to all other Departmental portals. However I have not resigned nor requested a separation from the DoE.
“Accordingly, you are notified that your email account will expire and be removed on 9 May 2024. Email accounts that remain active after a staff member has left an organisation create security risk that the Department is required to address under its Information Security Management System (ISMS) and obligations to the NSW Digital Information Security Policy (DISP).”
Now, 15 months from the 9th May 2024 is 9th Feb 2023. The problem here is that I was working at Nepean Creative and Performing Arts High School on a Permanent Part Time contract which I did not relinquish until 18th July 2023 due to complications from ‘SARS COV-2’ (infections x 2) and ‘Influenza A’ courtesy of my work environment.
” Email accounts that remain active after a staff member has left an organisation…….” What on earth are these people doing or not doing? as the case may be. All the correct information is available under ESS in the SAP Portal. The information there is populated by operatives within the DoE so how on God’s earth do mistakes such as are outlined in this post, come into being.
I offer two suggestions;
People don’t know how to do their job
AI assisted software is being used, in which case, heaven help us.
Given that I have not;
Resigned from the DoE
Applied for seperation
There is no justifiable reason to remove my current email and the contents thereof. To do so would also deny me access to all employee services to which I am still entitled until i do at some future date terminate my employment with the Department of Education.
For those in the Dept to whom this post is addressed, FYI, my last payslip is dated 04/01/24. For which I have screenshot and downloaded PDF. Which puts the conditional termination of my DoE email upon resigning (if no further relief work is undertaken) at 04/04/25.
Highlights of my working history with the Dept of Education can be viewed here;
It’s been a while, a whole year nearly since posting to this site. A lot has happened some of which is worth talking about. It’s been the year of generative image making and ChatGPT. Myths and legends abound and for me it was a year to do some myth busting.
ChatGPT was my entry point. Through some extensive dialog with educators who had concerns about student usage and the supposed advantages thereof I found myself doing some system testing to see the extent of the application of generative text and to better understand the process. Leaving aside the standard “write me an essay about…….” I went straight for the throat and entered questions directly from HSC exam papers (relevant only to teachers in NSW Australia) What i discovered was that that ChatGPT struggled with contextualising the nature of the question and the response. Firstly given that most exam or essay questions are not questions but instructions; questions generally start with what, when, where, why, who, how etc and not verbs such as discuss, investigate, analyse, compare, describe, assess, clarify, evaluate, examine, identify, outline etc the responses were consistently very average; if you were to scale them most would fall into the ‘C’ range. So; no advantage to be had here. This then led to ‘why does this happen’ and to understand that I realised i had to look at ‘how’ this all happens. That led to looking at decoding and encoding text.
Machines, so it appears do not ‘read’ text as we do. Whilst the eyes and brain are involved in a decoding and encoding of the letter shapes and their relationships, machine learning involves encoding text something like this;
The above is the first paragraph of this post encoded in UTF-8 Hex code
Encoded in UTF-32 it looks like this; u+00000074u+00000027u+00000073u+00000020u+00000062u+00000065u+00000065u+0000006eu+00000020u+00000061u+00000020u+00000077u+00000068u+00000069u+0000006cu+00000065u+0000002cu+00000020u+00000061u+00000020u+00000077u+00000068u+0000006fu+0000006cu+00000065u+00000020u+00000079u+00000065u+00000061u+00000072u+00000020u+0000006eu+00000065u+00000061u+00000072u+0000006cu+00000079u+00000020u+00000073u+00000069u+0000006eu+00000063u+00000065u+00000020u+00000070u+0000006fu+00000073u+00000074u+00000069u+0000006eu+00000067u+00000020u+00000074u+0000006fu+00000020u+00000074u+00000068u+00000069u+00000073u+00000020u+00000073u+00000069u+00000074u+00000065u+0000002eu+00000020u+00000041u+00000020u+0000006cu+0000006fu+00000074u+00000020u+00000068u+00000061u+00000073u+00000020u+00000068u+00000061u+00000070u+00000070u+00000065u+0000006eu+00000065u+00000064u+00000020u+00000073u+0000006fu+0000006du+00000065u+00000020u+0000006fu+00000066u+00000020u+00000077u+00000068u+00000069u+00000063u+00000068u+00000020u+00000069u+00000073u+00000020u+00000077u+0000006fu+00000072u+00000074u+00000068u+00000020u+00000074u+00000061u+0000006cu+0000006bu+00000069u+0000006eu+00000067u+00000020u+00000061u+00000062u+0000006fu+00000075u+00000074u+0000002eu+00000020u+00000049u+00000074u+00000027u+00000073u+00000020u+00000062u+00000065u+00000065u+00…………etc, etc
So when a prompt is entered into ChatGPT it is first encoded so that it can be read. The response from ChatGPT is likewise scripted in machine language and then decoded into text. How does it work?
It’s primarily a predictive model, that predicts sequences based on learnings from ‘other encodings’, because that’s what the neural network reads. When this is understood a lot of the ‘myth-understandings’ about machine learning are to some degree dissolved. The better the quality of the language structure of the texts that neural networks are trained on the better the likelihood of a cohesive albeit somewhat standardised, (bearing in mind the encoding and decoding sequence) response.
to be continued @ STAGESIX
Code points are numbers that represent Unicode characters. “A code point is the atomic unit of information. Text is a sequence of code points. Each code point is a number which is given meaning by the Unicode standard.”
Code units are numbers that encode code points to store or transmit Unicode text. One or more code units encode a single code point. Each code unit has the same size, which depends on the encoding format that is used. The most popular format, UTF-8, has 8-bit code units. @https://www.coderstool.com/unicode-text-converter
Code points are converted into ‘tokens’. The relationship between tokens is calculated in relation to the ‘prior learning’ in the LLM.
It’s Sunday, 6th November 2022 and we were at Bondi Beach for the opening of AddOn (part of the HeadOn Photo Festival) at the newly renovated Bondi Pavilion. Winter hadn’t really left and the day was uncharacteristically warm. The bodies on the beach, refugees from the COVID wars, lay scattered on the hot sands. It’s good to see AddOn return to the public space after being relegated to an online exhibition during the COVID lockdowns. This is my 9th year of exhibiting in this arm of the HeadOn Photo Festival. HeadOn is Australia’s largest photo festival.
Processed with Blackie
The show was opened by Charles McKean and Moshe Rosenzveig OAM. The impact of the COVID years was evident in the scaling down of the exhibition space, however given the restrictions, the works, although smaller than previous years in terms of printed scale, held up well and we (Suzy and I) are looking forward to the mailing out of the catalogue to this years exhibiting photographers.
Art + Photography + AI 