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Home >Mint-lounge >Mint-on-sunday >The flying shuttles of Melkote
Photo: Janapada Seva Trust
The flying shuttles of Melkote
10 min read . Updated: 02 Oct 2016, 10:40 AM IST Saritha Rao Rayachoti
As the world hurtles towards a fourth industrial revolution, the Koulagi family turns back the clock in order to weave a sustainable future
At the khadi weaving centre at the Hosa Jeevana Daari campus of the Janapada Seva Trust—a few kilometres ahead of the temple town of Melkote in Karnataka—a chirpy young woman who sits with her steel tiffin box open calls out to me in Kannada: "Come and have some lunch."
I don't remember the last time a stranger extended the courtesy of sharing her lunch with me. I regret the hasty meal I have had en route and thank her for the offer.
While I wait for Sumanas Koulagi from the trust, I wander along the U-shaped corridor flanked on one side by walls of exposed brick with gaps for better ventilation and light. The rooms leading from the corridor are occupied by a warping machine which winds an intricate web of cotton thread on to the warping beam, and a row of clacking frame looms where a particularly striking bolt of blue fabric catches my eye. There are no lights above the looms. At first appearance, this seems unusual for a weaving centre. Surely they must be working in shifts?
Twenty-four-year-old Sumanas arrives, and we sit in the verandah as he narrates the story of how the weaving centre, although started only about six years ago, has actually been 56 years in the making.
In the late 1950s, his grandfather Surendra Koulagi spent a few years as the personal secretary of Jayaprakash Narayan, which put him in touch with numerous Gandhian ideas in action, especially in the area of rural upliftment. Along with friends and well-wishers, in 1960, he set up the Janapada Seva Trust, a voluntary organization that has been serving society through need-based initiatives.
Surendra Koulagi's decision to base Janapada Seva Trust in Melkote itself had a lot to do with the village's weaving tradition. Melkote's weavers were renowned for weaving panche or dhoti with deep red borders on unbleached hand-woven cotton or silk fabric. Some believe that the colours symbolize the Thiruman Sricharanam or colours of the forehead mark worn by the Iyengar community, harking back to the time when the Hindu philosopher Ramanuja lived here for 12 years and established a centre for Vaishnavism.
The weavers supplied dhotis to the priests, devotees and the resident deity at Melkote, Narayanaswamy. To that extent, the demand was local.
The trust's activities, however, responded to a need for residential facilities for differently abled rural children. The facility was called Karunagruha. Over the years, the trust went on to introduce other initiatives, like a unique women's upliftment programme that identified and enabled those who wanted to complete their SSLC education.
Some aspect of weaving has always been part of every stage of Janapada Seva Trust's growth. For the children at Karunagruha, Surendra procured box charkhas so the children could learn to spin yarn. The hobby loom arrived at the trust thanks to his chance visit to a weaving centre in Maharashtra in the early 1970s, where they employed young men with disabilities to weave shoulder bags.
Surendra Koulagi met the person in charge who agreed to host his son Santosh and teach him. Santosh returned to Melkote with the know-how and they created an indigenous loom to begin producing shoulder bags.
In the 1980s, when Santosh joined the trust, he also began Hosa Jeevana Daari (a new way of life), a centre for sustainable living alternatives. Santosh regards Masanobu Fukuoka, the author of One-Straw Revolution, as a major influence in his life and this reflects in his outlook towards agriculture in particular, and sustainability as a whole.
Seeing the demand move favourably towards khadi and naturally dyed fabric, Santosh also began the khadi unit. His son Sumanas was home-schooled up to Class VII and then joined a Kannada-medium school. He went on to complete his masters in biodiversity conservation at Oxford and has been working closely with the khadi weaving centre.
The initiatives that the trust is currently into encompasses the interests and expertise of all three generations—a specialized adoption agency, a tree-planting effort with rare native varieties of the area, the centre for sustainable living alternatives that is primarily into environment education and the khadi weaving unit. But it is the last one, with its unique perspective to productivity, which is intriguing.
Reviving khadi
While our economic systems steer us increasingly towards infinite growth as a worthy, even imperative goal, the Koulagis and the Janapada Seva Trust are taking a different route to reviving weaving with their khadi centre.
For one, running such a unit requires a certification from the government, which the trust has, but apart from that it strives not to make use of any support or subsidies. "That's the whole idea and spirit of khadi," says Sumanas.
Also, the trust has taken the onus of sourcing yarn, creating loom space and marketing out of the hands of interested weavers and freed them up to focus on what they do best—weave.
"In most places across India, with livelihoods like weaving, the younger generation does not want to continue with the work," says Sumanas.
"About six years ago, we thought of reviving the weaving process. One thing we understood was that the weavers' remuneration was low. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act stipulates at least Rs250-300 per day. We thought of keeping the wages at least Rs300 per day. So, now our weavers make around Rs8,000-10,000 per month, which is good in a rural set-up. The scenario has changed today and a lot of people, including people from non-weaver families and especially the younger generation, want to join us."
As we walk alongside the frame looms, with their flying shuttles moving back and forth between the threads of the warps, Sumanas explains some basics. While both handloom and Khadi fabrics are woven by hand with non-automated looms, handloom weaving could employ machine-spun yarn. To that extent, the khadi process is done completely by hand from spinning to weaving to dyeing.
"You can make out the difference in the knots that you see in khadi fabric where the hand-spun fibre has snapped and has been knotted," says Sumanas.
The trust has no spinning facility. A unit in Chitradurga supplies slivers of continuous fibre to most of the khadi units in south India and a unit at Badanavalu procures the slivers from Chitradurga, and spins the yarn which the trust uses.
Two types of fabric are woven here, explains Sumanas. One is from organic cotton that they procure from Asha (Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture), a network of organic farmers and activists across India. Tula markets the finished organic fabric through their outlet in Chennai.
The second type of fabric is woven from the regular khadi cotton they get from the Khadi and Village Industries Commission. This fabric that they call Janapada Khadi is partly fulfilling orders from Nature Alley in Bengaluru or Fabindia, and partly retailed by them from a small outlet in Melkote.
The khadi weaving unit is one of the few in India where organic dyes are used. We walk past pits of water and a cauldron where yarn is being soaked in dye.
"We dye in three primary colours—red, blue and yellow. We get red from alizarin, a plant root, yellow from pomegranate peel or aralekkai (Terminalia chebula) and blue from indigo. Then we mix these colours and get others. Unlike chemical dyeing, in natural dyeing, the process is longer in trying to make the dye adhere to the cotton yarn."
Dyed yarn hangs on wooden beams drying in the sun. It is visually stunning, every bundle of colour complementing every other. I begin to wonder if this is because they are organic dyes, owing their colours to nature, where every colour adds to visual harmony.
In Melkote town, across the street from the Koulagi residence, is a yard with children's park equipment and a structure that houses Janapada Seva Trust's adoption centre. Two rooms in this building are used as the khadi weaving unit's tailoring room and storage facility. An open shelf is stacked with small squares of fabric, leftover scrap that has been cut to size to be sewn into patchwork quilts.
The tailoring unit makes about seven types of garments, including kurtas, salwars, formal shirts and college uniforms. In addition to these, the stockroom also has neat enclosed shelves storing towels, sarees, dhotis, dupattas and stoles. As I run my hand over the fabric, an unbleached kora saree with an indigo blue border, the knots on the surface stand out, like a textural fingerprint of khadi fabric.
Scale and philosophy
Sumanas reveals another aspect of the weaving unit's future that sets it apart. "When we increased wages, people started working overtime. We had a meeting with them to explain that this is not the idea of khadi. This is not a factory and people must not become machines. That's why we fixed the maximum limit for production—250 metres per loom per month. If they want more money, we should be able to bring more money for the same volume."
This volume is usually completed in 28 or 29 days. Work usually ends at around 5pm, which explains the absence of light above the looms. There are no weekdays or weekends, and weavers are free to come and weave any time. It's entirely up to them. This led to their getting some free time and they began a food-sharing day and movie screenings, which initially began with commercial Kannada movies of the 1970s and '80s and are transitioning gradually to documentaries. The idea is that workers must understand the bigger picture and the importance of their work.
When he speaks of maximum scale, Sumanas references Kirkpatrick Sale's book Human Scale that expounds on the perils of gigantism, the idea that while size matters, human scale matters even more. "Every activity has a scale. The minimum makes it viable but the maximum is also important. Once you go beyond the maximum scale, the efficiency starts decreasing. We feel that these 11 looms and one warping machine, with a set up involving 30-40 people including spinners in Badanavalu, are good enough."
I ask him about people who are interested to join them and whether that would be an opportunity to expand capacity. He says, "If someone is interested and if they are willing to do it on their own, we can guide and support them."
It is then that the penny drops. I sense resonances between Sale's views on the myth of bigness and optimal limits, Fukuoka's belief that modern science was taking man increasingly away from nature and Gandhi's ideals on self-sustenance. Nowhere is this more evident than in Sumanas's choice of subject for his PhD in development studies at the University of Sussex, UK—his thesis will be on shifting developmental focus to human energy with khadi as example.
Janapada Seva Trust's projects are perhaps modest since they support need-based initiatives. The success of an initiative is in reaching a point where it is redundant. For instance, Karunagruha became redundant due to the success of the government's polio eradication campaign. For a voluntary organization such as this to be successful at need-based initiatives requires it to be of a modest size and nimble enough to gauge any impending redundancy. Also, from a purely work-life balance perspective, the maximum scale ensures that the weaver's quality of life doesn't suffer in the pursuit of infinite growth.
Between 1811 and 1816, loom workers in Nottingham, UK, wrecked machinery and burned down mills rebelling against industrialization in the textile sector. The word Luddite, referring to these workers, has since been misattributed to technophobes in the digital age worthy of ridicule.
The Koulagis and the three men who inspire them—Gandhi, Fukuoka and Sale—can all be called Luddites in the etymological sense (Sale even went on to write about the Luddites). They all have one thing in common—they aren't so much afraid of industrialization or technology as they are opposed to the loss of livelihoods.
But unlike the 19th-century textile workers who resorted to violence to assert their skill in a rapidly industrializing society, the Koulagis strive towards the same goal—human development—but by non-violent means.
The journey ends at the Koulagi residence, where we wait to meet Sumanas's grandfather, Surendra, and his father, Santosh.
"Meanwhile," Sumanas says, "come and have some lunch."
Saritha Rao Rayachoti is an independent writer based in Chennai
Comments are welcome at feedback@livemint.com


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CoRoT-23b es el primer planeta descubierto por la misión CoRoT que pertenece al sistema de la estrella CoRoT-23.

Referencias

Planetas extrasolares descubiertos en 2011
Jupíteres calientes

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


With kisses like that, I wish this was the Universe where you were my soulfinder.
The last thing I wanted was to fall in love because, deep down, I remembered that love hurt.
Even geniuses could get things wrong-look at Einstein's unfortunate choice of a hairdresser.
My fears had blinded me to the prize i was about to throw away.
Soul finders can't be bad for each other they are each other. We aren't complete apart.


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Jesse Berst: Wake up and break up
Microsoft can fuss around and whine, or take charge of its own destiny
By Jesse Berst | January 14, 2000 -- 10:16 GMT (02:16 PST) | Topic: Tech Industry
Slap!
That's the sound of my cyberslap-upside-the-head-to-Bill Gates. Because he needs to wake up and break up -- before the decision gets taken out of his hands. News reports yesterday indicate the Department of Justice and state attorneys general have concocted a break-up plan for Microsoft. Whether the reports are entirely accurate doesn't matter. The legal handwriting is on the wall. Microsoft can fuss around and whine. Or take charge of its own destiny.
Here's the irony. If Gates implements a break-up strategy now -- and if he does it right -- Microsoft will be better off. Here's why:
Microsoft has become too big, too bloated, too territorial. It has brilliant people, but they're stifled by a ponderous corporate structure.Three or four leaner, meaner companies could react more quickly to competitors and market trends.
Microsoft could increase shareholder value by spinning off MSN, its Internet division.
The most recent government proposal reportedly divides Microsoft into three companies: an operating systems group, an applications group and a services group; the latter would presumably include its Internet division. If I were Bill Gates and looking for a breakup that makes business sense, I'd sort it out this way:
Applications and services
But Bill Gates is a stubborn man. It won't surprise me if he continues thumbing his nose at the Justice Department. Insisting he's done nothing wrong. Blathering about his right to innovate, until he finds himself sitting on the sidelines while someone else dismantles his company.
Whack!
That's the sound of ZDNet readers hitting the mailroom button below to tell me whether they agree. Should Gates make a pre-emptive strike and break up Microsoft himself? Let me know.
CXO Government Security
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Home » Editorial » This is how they create battlefield noise in Hollywood
This is how they create battlefield noise in Hollywood
by Jurgita Lapienytė
in Editorial
A Portuguese university professor Nuno Fonseca once started applying a computer graphics technique to simulate sounds of explosions, sandstorms, or battlefields. Now, the software that his startup Sound Particles developed is used by the creators of such blockbuster films as Aquaman, Wonder Woman, and Game of Thrones.
I met Mr. Nuno Fonseca during this year's virtual Web Summit, where he was networking with other professionals and hunting for investors, as he is looking forward to scaling his business. He mentioned that he is running a startup and that the software he created is being used in major Hollywood studios and productions, such as Game of Thrones and Star Wars.
"The idea initially started around 2006, when I realized the most interesting visual effects that I was seeing in the movies were using particle systems, a technique widely used in computer graphics for many years", he told me.
Naturally, I was intrigued by what a small Portuguese startup has to offer to Hollywood. So, we sat down (virtually, of course) with Nuno Fonseca to discuss his innovation.
"Most of the times you see an explosion in a movie, chances are that it is not an actual explosion but a computer-generated effect," he told CyberNews. The effect is generated by using particle systems – a computer graphics technique that creates thousands or even millions of small objects to simulate fire, rain, sandstorms, dust, smoke, and explosions.
"This works by combining a huge number of small particles (pixels or small groups of pixels) with certain initial characteristics such as color, movement, that change over time. So roughly speaking, for the explosion example, you might have a certain amount of particles concentrated in a particular position that initially are yellow in color but, as time goes by, they move towards random directions while their color changes to orange/red and eventually becomes black/grey to simulate the smoke," he explained.
Nuno Fonseca
Usually, this technique is used to create a visual effect, but a Portuguese professor came up with the idea to apply the same concept to sound and use thousands of different sounds to create the movie soundscape faster. The premise is the same: taking small elements to create something that's complex.
"Imagine that you are a Hollywood sound artist trying to create the sounds of a battlefield with thousands of soldiers fighting. The traditional workflow would be to start adding sounds of gunshots or explosions one-by-one and creating layers of sounds until you reach a point of complexity that represents what is going on in the picture. However, this procedure takes a really long time and is very tedious," Nuno Fonseca explained.
With Sound Particles software, it's possible to create a sonic particle system that resembles a battlefield, which is composed of thousands of particles, each with random movements, and import 50 war-related sounds.
"Then, each particle would randomly select and play one of those 50 sounds, while our engine renders the sound of each one of the thousand particles from a certain perspective. This means that, within a few minutes, you can create something that would otherwise take much longer and consequently involve much more money. This is why Hollywood studios are moving towards this type of approach," he explained.
His goal is to eventually do to audio what Pixar did to animation – make it 3D.
"Right now, the animation is all made in 3D. However, the sound/audio workflows that create the sounds for those animations are almost always made in 2D. For us, it makes no sense at all. Thus, our main goal is to completely change the audio workflows that are currently being implemented and shift them 100% to 3D. It is what Pixar made a few decades ago with animation, and that is exactly what we want to do with sound," Nuno Fonseca said.
Sound Particles' software was already used in productions like Game of Thrones, Maleficent 2, and Aquaman. Even though technology saves time and effort, it still requires a lot of human assistance.
What about the quality of sound?
The only process that doesn't require human assistance is the render itself. Sound effects professionals still need to select and import the source files and set up the right parameters for the specific project they are working on.
"For instance, for the battlefield example, the project would have completely different settings and source files when compared to a project that was meant to create the sound of an earthquake," Fonseca told CyberNews.
The source files are created by professionals who work on movies or other types of production. They may be recorded or synthesized previously and then imported into Sound Particles. Then, users can set up the particle systems as they wish, and Sound Particles will render all the sounds together.
As it supposedly saves time and effort, I wondered whether it impacts the quality of sound. Fonseca insisted that it doesn't compromise it.
"Additionally, since Sound Particles uses particle system techniques where everything is associated with some kind of randomness, the results sound very organic and natural," he said.
Fonseca says that there's a difference between a human-made and a software-made battlefield sound.
"With Sound Particles, you can create soundscapes with millions of sounds. Whereas an average audio professional wouldn't be capable of generating such a complex sound (maybe they would be capable of doing it, but they would spend days/weeks of work)," he said.
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The Role of Tenure
The Role of Tenure I enjoyed [Dominique G.] Homberger's and [A. Ravi P.] Rau's measured and carefully argued defense of research and tenure in the university ( The Scientist, 12[10]:8, May 11, 1998). I have often found myself defending the tenure system, but I would like to take a few of the authors' points and play devil's advocate. Tenure is frequently justified as something more than a rigid seniority system; it is elevated as a defense of free and critical inquiry. Yet the tenure system
Jennifer Innes
I enjoyed [Dominique G.] Homberger's and [A. Ravi P.] Rau's measured and carefully argued defense of research and tenure in the university ( The Scientist, 12[10]:8, May 11, 1998). I have often found myself defending the tenure system, but I would like to take a few of the authors' points and play devil's advocate.
Tenure is frequently justified as something more than a rigid seniority system; it is elevated as a defense of free and critical inquiry. Yet the tenure system offers no protection to researchers, thinkers, and teachers in the early (possibly more radical) stages of their careers. Reappointment and tenure review can, in fact, offer an easy opportunity to dismiss a colleague with unpopular ideas for a wide variety of vague criteria. The tenure system can be a tool to enforce conformity at the stage that young scholars are establishing the foundations...


When I was introduced to The Day That I immediately loved the idea. I was delighted to be asked to review a product from the site. How absolutely gorgeous. A photo of dawn on the day you were married, or your child was born, or you first met your true love. Such a sweet concept.
The Day That is a company that take photographs of dawn each day and make them up into personalised prints at your request. What a unique idea and an absolutely beautiful personlised gift. If you are looking for unique baby gifts I think these are just perfect. You get a couple of choices of image and you can choose the frame and size too and a personalised inscription.
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If you would like to get your very own personalised photo, The Day That have a fantastic offer just for you, where you can get a mounted, unframed print absolutely free with every framed print you order. To claim your free print, or just to find out more about them, phone The Day That directly on 01736 758109 and tell them Baby Budgeting sent you. Their personal customer service is second to none, and they'll be absolutely delighted to take your call!


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Human Resources (HR) Director
Average Human Resources (HR) Director with Legal Compliance Skills Salary in Washington, District of Columbia
The average salary for a Human Resources (HR) Director with Legal Compliance skills in Washington, District of Columbia is $102,961.
Is Human Resources (HR) Director your job title? Find out what you should be paid
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Updated: Mon Feb 26 2018
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Human resource directors have many different roles and responsibilities in many different organizations. These directors can head up several departments and put in place someone to manage them. They are strategic partners, and proponents for the company and for the people who work for the company. They also have the responsibility of dealing with the day-to-day problems and complaints from their employees, employee benefits, payroll and employee paperwork. They ensure employees' adherence to pol…Read more
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text:
The City Museum of Kathmandu
Facebook @thecitymuseum on twitter @thecitymuseum on instagram
Das Archives
Chitrakar Archives
Thapa Archives
Chitrakar in Nepali means 'artist' or 'painter'. The Chitrakars learned their skills through their inheritance as they start their traditional painting education under their fathers. The Chitrakars are not only painters of scroll-painting, and frescoes in temples and palaces, but up to the present have continued to create masks and paintings for certain ritual occasion among the Newars, and also to produce statues and to paint ceremonial vessels.
Dirgha Man Chitrakar, the second son of the painter Laxmi Lal was a well-known painter of his times. Beside being a painter, he was also a photographer. Prime Minister Chandra Shumsher appointed Dirgha Man as a Royal Painter and Court Photographer. When he accompanied the Prime Minister on his trip to England and France in 1908 as part of his entourage, he had opportunity to paint views of Europe and study European art.
At the age of 71, he resigned from his position at the court of Maharajas. Dirgha Man's only son Ganesh Man Chitrakar took his father's position as a Royal Painter and more particularly as a Court Photographer. In 1952, after Nepal began to open up the outside world and the first development organizations set up offices in the country, Ganesh Man was given a post in USAID as chief photographer. He made the first aerial photographs of Kathmandu Valley in 1955 and was the first person in the country to develop color slides. Around 1970s, he opened the photo studio Ganesh Photo Lab.
The Chitrakar collection includes glass plate negatives taken at Nepal's court and the Kathmandu Valley between 1900 and 1946 and acetate negatives taken between 1946 and 1975. The collection also includes cameras, background and enlargers that were used by Dirgha Man and Ganesh Man Chitrakar.
We are open 10AM to 7PM everyday.
See Map & Location Details.
The City Museum
Nepalis: Rs. 50
SAARC citizens: US$1
All other nationals: US$2.5
The City Gallery Free
Sura Building.
Yak & Yeti Road,
Durbarmarg, Kathmandu
General Info: info@thecitymuseum.org
Events/Bookings: events@thecitymuseum.org
© 2013-2014 The City Museum, Kathmandu. Site by Sarahana. Logo by Sahara Shrestha.


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Will the real Returned please stand up?
By Arceus,
November 27, 2021 in General Discussion
RuneScape Status: F2P
Earlier this year, a small number of RuneScape accounts (about 1%) were unceremoniously removed from the game and unable to log in due to technical issues. Understandably, many of those impacted were frustrated by the issue and missed opportunities from the deprivation of their enjoyment of the game. Despite assurances and daily updates from the game developers, many were not thrilled. Apparently, it's not fun to be locked out of one's own account through no fault of one's own. In light of this, I'd like to share a related experience that I've never really talked about much, which in the words of Monty Python might be kind of the same and kind of "something completely different."
Seven years ago, Jagex permanently banned my account for allegedly botting. This occurred completely randomly as I was training, and I had never received any warning or ban before. This was categorically and unequivocally incorrect. When I followed through appeals channels, I was informed that the account status had been confirmed and received little more than assurances that Jagex's decision was "correct." This was despite the fact that I had never been banned for any reason on any account, even for a day. By some stretch of the imagination, I had gone from a rule-abiding player with no offences to never being able to play again.
Why online cheating is an issue in the first place
Allow me to back up a couple steps and take a more general view. Jagex's game RuneScape is an MMORPG, which is an intimidatingly long acronym but essentially means it is a game with many online players participating together in an online game. RuneScape has no character "classes" like some other games, allowing every player to train up skills through a large number of repetitive actions. Eventually, skill "mastery" is reached, which is often celebrated as a milestone together with in-game friends and a Superman-style cape. There's a lot of pride for game players achieving a milestone like this, even though the magnitude of the accomplishment has dimmed over the years.
One issue in the game is that sometimes, people want to take a shortcut to these goals by effectively cheating. The difficulty of the tasks is generally not very high and entails little more than a sequence of mouse clicks in the correct location. Paradoxically, some number of players attempt to create and use automation to execute these tasks. In the simplest terms, they are making a computer train their skills for them. If you have never considered this concept before, it may seem somewhat bizarre. What is the point of cheating for "accomplishments" in a virtual world?
This is not an easy question to answer, yet many players (some of whom I've known) have done so. In fact, a friend of mine (let's call him Steve) once asked me to help make and sell programs to other people to perform this sort of activity. He hinted that it could be a six-figure income. Still, his request was far less difficult to answer. I said no thanks. I certainly wasn't going to do something I didn't believe in for blood money.
In search of 'justice'
The propensity of the human condition to cheat or to take an easy way out is often understated. To hammer the point home, I'll bring in another anecdote or two. I remember a children's cartoon program where the band of characters has a race. One of the characters takes an (illegal) shortcut and wins the race. He is given a prize and everyone congratulates him, but after a little while, guilt catches up and he admits that his performance was less than honest. The prize is handed over to the second place finisher. Remarkably, the second-place character also admits to a different sort of cheating and refuses the prize. This continues until it is established that no one actually followed the rules. The integrity of the competition has been completely ruined.
But surely this is just a silly kids' cartoon, right? You may be surprised by how the real world can mirror the experiences we tried to teach our grade school peers. A few years ago, RuneScape decided to hold a tournament with a significant cash prize of $20,000. The winner of the tournament - and stop me if you've heard this one before - was disqualified for cheating, and it took Jagex another week to figure out what to do with the prize money [1]. This is not unique to RuneScape or games in general, but instead underscores that assuming every member of a large group will be honest and straightforward is generally unworkable.
One might argue, legitimately, that the one-off premise of a large chunk of cash presents more temptation to cheat than the typical everyday gameplay. But I hope by this point, you might posit that there is a more-than-ephemeral cheating issue in RuneScape. In fact, the issue of individual players running automation on their accounts is not even the largest facet of the problem. I won't delve into the details here, but suffice it to say that there is a black market for all sorts of items and in-game gold.
Needless to say, Jagex is put in between a bit of a rock and a hard place in dealing with this situation. It might seem deceptively simple. Just sanction the players who cheat and be done with it, right?
Unfortunately, this does not quite work as a solution. This is further exacerbated by the 'M' in MMORPG I mentioned earlier - the game is massive with millions of players, and any solution must scale. While it's certainly true that some players cheated and some players do not, how does one tell? It is instructive to turn to other examples here. Typically, when one party accuses another of something, there is some evidence, a collection of facts or information that demonstrate proof beyond a reasonable doubt that some action has transpired. Often, evidence requires time and effort to procure, and the party making the accusation finds it more expedient to bypass this step. Let me give a couple of examples to highlight this fact.
In the children's cartoon, "Avatar: The Last Airbender," the main character is accused by a mayor of committing crimes in his previous lifetime and thrown in jail to await trial. Leaving aside the reincarnation theory for another time, the character's friends are panicked and quickly search for something to exonerate him of the crime, even though it literally occurred before he was born. Eventually, they find a few verifiable facts and are granted an audience with the mayor, but when they try to present their evidence, the mayor waves them off dismissively. Laughing, the mayor elaborates on what he means: "Simple, I say what happened, then you say what happened, then *I* decide who's right. That's why we call it 'justice.' Because it's 'just us'" [2]. Does this seem like justice?
Consider another example. In the TV show Star Trek, we learn about a species called the Cardassians with another interesting version of justice. "In Cardassia," one of their political leaders, Gul Dukat, explains, "the verdict is always known before the trial begins; and it's always the same." The implication is that the criminal is found guilty, and typically sentenced to the death penalty. Another character inquires what purpose such a trial serves, and recieves the answer: "Because the people demand it. They enjoy watching justice triumph over evil, every time. They find it comforting." When pressed about whether they ever try an innocent man by mistake, he insists that "Cardassians don't make mistakes" [3]. Even if we take Gul Dukat at his word, what would happen if humans implemented such a system? Do humans make mistakes? Has justice triumphed over evil every time?
To err is to be an automated system with inadequate supervision
Now let's turn to Jagex. We've established that cheating is an issue on RuneScape, and clearly Jagex will have to deal with these troublemakers. What evidence does Jagex provide when banning someone, especially permanently, from their game? I've had this experience firsthand, and they show no evidence. Let me repeat that: no evidence. There is a vague statement about one's account being involved in "serious rule-breaking" and explaining that Jagex won't share evidence because it may compromise their detection methods. Even many years later, there remains no explanation and no evidence with the claim that revealing evidence from many years ago would negatively impact the anti-cheating efforts of today.
As a matter of fact, I still see that message, which raises some questions for me and probably anyone exercising the radical discipline known as critical thinking. Is Jagex using the same detection methods as seven years ago? Is the bot detection system so fragile that revealing any sort of evidence endangers the whole thing? Have they miraculously concocted a superhuman system that makes no errors? How long will I have to wait before I can see evidence: ten, twenty, thirty years?
I'm not privy to Jagex's internal system, but I do have several years' experience in data science heavy jobs. My best guess is that Jagex is using an in-house model to look at behavior of individual accounts and compare them against each other. Some accounts are more easy than others to identify as potential bots, and of course there's nothing that stops Jagex from botting intentionally on an account themselves to augment their data. One can easily access (free) cheating software online and run it on accounts as a control. Jagex might then run player A (known bot) and compare behavior against player B (suspected player) for similarities and obtain some numerical measure of the likelihood of a bot. If it's sufficiently likely, they then proceed and ban it. Assuming Jagex uses this or some similar model, there is one fatal flaw which is known as a false positives.
To understand why false positives might be an issue, it is instructive to elaborate on the problem to be solved. Jagex is trying to figure out if a player is a bot or not a bot. They can't read its mind, so it could be either a real player or bot. Their algorithm can also say real player or bot. Even a casual user of computer software is probably familiar with it acting up from time to time. In other words, some level of mistakes in software written by humans is unavertable. Therefore, it is unlikely that the groundtruth (player is a human or player is a bot) is unlikely to match the result from the software all of the time, thus yielding four possibilities. First, a player could be real and the algorithm says it is a real player. Then there's no harm done. Secondly, the player could be a bot, and Jagex's system could say it is a bot. This is also good because a cheating player has been correctly identified and can be sanctioned as appropriate. Unfortunately, while this would be a great place to stop, there are two more possibilities. Possibility #3 says that a player is a bot, and the system flags it as a real player. This is problematic because someone who perhaps should have been sanctioned has escaped scot-free. However, I'd like to focus on the last case: possibility #4. This case is when the player is legitimate, but the system incorrectly flags them as a bot. This means the player will be banned anyway, despite not engaging in any cheating behavior.
In a perfect world, we would avoid possibilities #3 and #4 entirely. Hopefully, we can all agree that these are undesirable outcomes. Unfortunately, I don't think an automated system can ever fully avoid them. After all, there are many cases of people wrongfully jailed for serious charges in real life, or guilty individuals that retained their freedom for far too long. If governments cannot hold people accountable for serious crime (or not wrongly incarcerate others who are innocent) with a one hundred percent success rate, what hope does a proprietary, secret algorithm have of arbitrating the truth of cheating in a video game? Should one simply "see no evil" and accept Jagex's determinations as gospel? I see the inevitable conclusion that Jagex is going to get at least some wrong. Of course, they probably won't be missing a large fraction because of the obvious drawbacks to the business model, but I think even a Jmod would admit it won't bat a thousand.
Authority can't be wrong
Despite this, there is an absolutely rabid belief among the players that Jagex's system is somehow flawless. If someone has been banned for botting, it is surely due to them cheating, not any sort of mistake by the company. The fervency with which players cling to this belief is almost impossible to understate and difficult to understand without firsthand experience. It would be a lie to say that what my account was banned, I could count the number of friends who believed in me on one hand. It wouldn't be a lie to say that I could count them on one finger.
I've described a concept in a couple of fictional examples which is generally referred to more concretely as a kangaroo court. However, I'm not going to accuse Jagex of running a kangaroo court. Instead I will point to an infamous update formed from a pun on the name of a penal colony from the Land Down Under, Botany Bay. This update allowed players to witness firsthand accounts being permanently banned, and even to vote on an accounts' demise from several choices, which many cheered [4]. The account, in a scripted dialogue by Jagex, might attempt to say something in its defense. However, the arguments would be quashed without even a passing pretense of jurisprudence, and the player destroyed anyhow. There was actually a reward from participating in this activity, ironically named the Pitchfork of justice. We fell for it hook, line, and sinker at the time, but I think this was one large part of the mentality that Jagex could do no harm, and the pervasive attitude that a legitimate player couldn't possibly be confused with a bot. Even Jagex ultimately capitulated and removed the arena from the game completely.
Alongside boasting in their FAQs about they never make an error in banning accounts, one of Jagex's suggestions is to make another account and continue playing. I ended up doing this, reaching my original goals on a new account, and playing other accounts as well. At one point, Jagex banned another of my accounts, again for allegedly botting. This time, the account in question was a member, and when I contested the charge, it was gone within 24 hours. Ironically, after the "offense" was quashed, I had a Jmod tweeting me that ban would stick and I would have to wait to get back into the game - after the sanctions were already removed. This would seem to highlight some disarray between what's shown in public and what's actually done: it's almost as if Jagex wanted to ban their cake and eat it too.
A rumor can travel halfway across a decade while the truth is putting on its boots
Ultimately, my original account was unbanned late last year, a bit over six years after the initial infraction was placed on my account. I couldn't find any message or information, but it's once again free to play without any apparent restrictions. I'm certainly grateful for whoever managed to pull that off, and if correcting an error after 6 years is the closest I'll get to an apology, I'll forgive Jagex. I would stop short of awarding a gold star for customer service or general fairness though. I have known several (member) friends over the years who have incurred a two-day ban mistakenly from Jagex's system and have it reversed. It's true that "forfeited income from players disenchanted from a false ban on the game" doesn't show up as a line on the corporate balance sheet, but I do imagine there is a cost. There's a reason Jagex won Golden Joystick awards ago with a large chunk of the community as free players.
Even Jagex admits on its advertising for membership packages that RuneScape members receive priority support, though it's doubtful that implies a wait time of months or years for free players. I was likely one of the players with the highest amount of hours logged on the free side of the game without becoming a member on that particular account. I was one of the most persistent players sanctioned, and I still supported and even subscribed on another account later on. In the end, I suppose it's possible that I'm the only one, or near the only one, with the experience of being wrongfully barred from the game for six years. But what if I wasn't?
[1] https://kotaku.com/20k-runescape-tournament-cant-decide-a-winner-because-1818976318
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0516772/characters/nm0393222
[3] https://www.quotes.net/mquote/861140
[4] https://runescape.wiki/w/Talk:Botany_Bay
"Fight for what you believe in, and believe in what you're fighting for." Can games be art?
My blog here if you want to check out my Times articles and other writings! I always appreciate comments/feedback.
RuneScape Status: None
RSN: wkw
Wow this forum is for discussion now? Thanks Dr Frankenstein!
The reason the community is so in favor of 'everyone who is banned for botting botted' is because of the ever popular 'jmod smackdowns' where someone pleads they didn't bot, but a mod later comes in and shows they botted or they RWTd and the poster never responds again.
They are very memorable and funny, that is why they remain in the common memory longer than the rare false positives.
On the other hand, there are a good number of people who post and instead of a jmod smackdown they get an 'oops' from them and they continue playing. But they are also very vocal about being banned in the first place. Someone like them, unlike you, aren't making a big scene and using community upvotes to get a mod to look into it. So sadly, and likely with many more others who are false positives likely never post about it and unless they intentionally check, are never made aware that their ban was quashed
But yes, I've known a fair number of friends who were perm banned for botting or RWT who later had their ban quashed. In fact I think someone from TIF got perm for RWT'd (I think they were a pmod even!), when they didn't, only because their name was on the friends list of a RWTer they banned.
Yes, jagex goes fire ready aim . But with their huge volume of accounts they need to go through, a 0.01% of false positives would indeed be a significant amount of real players
Runescape player since January 2005
Ego Sum Deus Quo Malum Caligo et Barathum
zaralarsnor
Love the information on the eye. I've always wondered why it wasn't done better. The third arm is perfectly done, then we have a cheesy third eye. lil boosie
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