Saturday 11 April 2015

All White Labour?

With the up and coming general election, we've been receiving election material.

When my other half mentioned that the leaflet we received from the Labour candidate for York Central looked a little bit "overly white" (paraphrasing), I  decided to run the numbers.

The York Unitary Authority's demographics, from the 2011 census show that we have 94.3% "white" people [1].

We sat down and counted the faces on the leaflet, excluding the candidate themselves. We came to a count of 14 faces, all of which were white.

The chance of picking 14 people at random from a population which is 94.3% white and getting 14 white people is 43.97%. That means that the chance of getting at least one non-white person on the leaflet would've been 56.03%.

Obviously, this is quite close to a toss-up, but bear in mind that these people aren't usually selected for at random. All sorts of biases go into selecting people for photo shoots, from who turns out, to who interacts with the candidate, who the photographer chooses to take photographs of and who is selecting which photos from the shoots end up on the page and their biases towards what will "look good," and what is expected to promote an image of diversity.

Anyways, I don't want to say one way or the other about what this does or does not mean, I just want the data to be available for people.

References:

[1] : 2011 Census: KS201EW Ethnic group, local authorities in England and Wales (Excel sheet 335Kb) (http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/re-reference-tables.html?newquery=*&newoffset=0&pageSize=25&edition=tcm%3A77-286262) Accessed: 2015-04-11

Monday 6 April 2015

OpenBSD time_t Upgrade

Last night I foolishly undertook the upgrade from 5.4 to 5.5, without properly reading the documentation. My login shell is zsh, which meant that, when the upgrade was complete, I couldn't login to my system.

I'd get to the login prompt, enter my credentials, see the motd, and be kicked out as zsh crashed, due to the change from 32-bit time_t to 64-bit time_t change. I'd also taken the security precaution of locking the root account.

If fixed this as follows:

  1. Reboot into single-user mode (boot -s at the boot> prompt)
  2. Mounted my filesystems (they all needed fsck running on them, before mount -a)
  3. Changed my login shell to /bin/sh (chsh -s /bin/sh <<username>>)
  4. Rebooted.
After that, it was a simple question of logging in and doing the usual; update my PKG_PATH to point at a 5.4 mirror, and running "pkg_add -u" to upgrade all my affected packages.

I then continued on to upgrade my system to OpenBSD 5.5.

A quick warning: This is one particular failure mode arising from not reading the docs. It may get you back into your system, but it's unlikely to fix all your woes if you don't read the docs.

So, the moral of the story is: ALWAYS READ THE DOCS.