'Housing Affordability Crisis' Hits Home

On the whole, 2008 has been a pretty good year for me. I enrolled in a post-graduate course at Melbourne Uni - if I keep it up I'll be a licensed Master of Publishing and Communications. Hell, I might even go do the mortarboard and gown thing for the first time when I finish this one. By dint of not so persistent practice and application my drawing steadily improved to the point where I felt up to hanging a few of the better ones on the study wall. Things were looking good, as long as I ignored the 'housing affordability crisis' - in plain English, Australia's chronic housing shortage.

Then in late October, when I was out in the outer leafies, dog-sitting again, the usual happened: that cantankerous old bastard in the sky, the one in whom I refuse to believe, dropped a big, fat jobbie into my life. I came home for an overnight stay, after a class, and Zeppo Bakunin showed me the notice to quit that we'd received from the agents. Our landlord and landlady were splitting up and the landlord and his daughter needed a place to live. Moving us out, so that they could move in, was cheaper than moving into a rented house, in a tight rental market, and keeping up the mortgage payments on this place, regardless of the rental income and negative gearing. I used to like our landlords but, sooner or later, this country's housing market forces everyone involved in it to act like a bastard.

So now Zeppo Bakunin and I are looking for the opportunity to perform our own little act of bastardry - we're looking for a house we can move to. Whatever we look at, there's bound to be at least one young family looking at the same place. People who'll use the extra bedrooms for sleeping in, rather than accomodating desks, computers, books and assorted stuff.

Since the market is very tight at the moment, it's wise to have back-up plans. My plan B is to get really active on internet dating sites, and try to find someone with really low expectations with a bungalow in the backyard. Plan C is to pack up all or most of the stuff, put it into self-storage and use my pensioner Christmas bonus to do a bit of travelling: the way the economy is heading, I reckon the first edition of The Rough Sleeper's Guide to Australia will find a ready market.

At times like these, I envy the Swedes. Back in 2002, I read a World Bank report which gave the Swedish government a slap on the wrist for allowing a surplus of public housing to develop. This was, of course, a waste of economic resources and therefore economically irrational, if not irresponsible. Given the choice between economically responsible government and a roof over my head, I know which one I'd take right now.

ROFLMAO Again

This time from Andy Bolt, giving a bit of stick to another irresponsible journalist creating another 'wild warming scare':

CLIMATE change could threaten the safety of blood used for life-saving transfusions, Australian experts have warned.

A report by West Australian researchers has raised concern that rising temperatures will increase the prevalence of viruses, like dengue and Ross River, already circulating in the northern regions of the country.

Really, whichever News organisation ran that story should be looking long and hard at its recruitment policies; their journalists and editors are just woeful.

Update: you can read the abstract of the research report here. On dengue fever, it says:

[D]engue is currently of most concern to blood safety because; it can cause fatalities, there are regular seasonal outbreaks in Northern Australia and, in contrast to other viruses mentioned above an overseas case of transfusion transmission has already been documented. Notably, despite the lack of a suitable dengue screening test the ARCBS [Australian Red Cross Blood Service] already implements supplementary measures to protect the blood supply during outbreaks. (my emphasis)

Oddly enough, the fact that the ARCBS already has measures in place to protect the blood supply from dengue wasn't newsworthy enough to include in the News report.

Sound Bite Snake Oil

It seems that since two global warming 'sceptics' appeared on Sunday's Sixty Minutes, mainstream opinion on global warming has shifted back to the 'it ain't happening and even if it is, it's not man made' position. Maybe - no-one's done the polling yet.

The Sixty Minutes report 'Crunch Time', included this sound bite from Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT:

PROF. RICHARD LINDZEN: We need CO-2. It's not a poison, it's not a pollutant. It's essential for life on earth. I mean how much are we going to depend on people's ignorance in order to produce panic?

Lindzen's position, stated as a logical syllogism is:

Nothing that is necessary for life can be a pollutant.
CO₂ is necessary for life. ergo:
CO₂ cannot be a pollutant.

Or, more generally:

Nothing that is necessary for life can be an environmental problem.
CO₂ is necessary for life. ergo:
CO₂ cannot be an environmental problem.

Is this reasoning correct? Let's try applying it to some other chemical compounds and elements that are necessary to life and see:

Nothing that is necessary for life can be a pollutant.
Phosphorus is necessary for life. ergo:
Phosphorus cannot be a pollutant.

So, even though an excess of phosporus in freshwater occasionally causes algal blooms, it's wrong to call phosphorus a pollutant. And distinctly unAustralian if the source of the phosphorus is agricultural run-off.

Now let's take the general case:

Nothing that is necessary for life can be an environmental problem.
Sodium and chlorine are necessary for life. ergo:
Sodium and chlorine cannot be an environmental problem.

And that about wraps it up for salinisation of soils - it just can't be a problem.

There's something obviously wrong with Lindzen's reasoning: his major premise - that necessities of life can't be pollutants. What has me puzzled is how an environmental scientist could overlook his error and lavish praise on Sixty Minutes for including him in their report.

Milli Vanilli to Stage Comeback in 2012?

Sources inside the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games revealed today that 1980s lip-synch wonders Milli-Vanilli have been booked to perform at the opening ceremony of the London Olypics in 2012.

It is also rumoured that the London opening ceremony will feature 2012 Boy Scouts and Girl Guides recreating the Blue Screen of Death displayed at the Beijing opening ceremony with flash cards. This rumour remains unconfirmed.

Botticelli's Dismembered Zephyr

The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli c 1482 - 1486

Despite months of practice, I still have moments when I think I'll never be able to draw good. The other day, while I was copying the figure of Venus from that famous Botticelli painting - with a view to producing a piss-take of the image - I made a heartening discovery. Sandro Botticelli wasn't all that good at it either.

When you look at Botticelli's painting, your eye is drawn first to the central figure of Venus, then to the woman on the right (a Horae, according to Wikipedia), holding the robe. Then maybe you glance to the left, at the two winged Zephyrs. Give them more than a glance, and you'll find there's something very dodgy about the figure of the female Zephyr, tucked into the male Zephyr's armpit.

It's easier to see if you trace the main visible outlines and contours of the two figures separately, to disentangle those legs. Here's the male:

He's facing the right of the picture, with his right hand side is turned towards us. Now here's the female:

I've labeled her feet, as indicated by the position of the big toe on each. It's the first hint that there's something distinctly wrong with her anatomy. Just how wrong becomes clear if you try to fill in the gaps, by extending the line of the right thigh and the torso, which we're seeing from her left side. Her left arm is in the forground, with her right hand held over it; the right arm passes behind the male figure.

To start with, we'll need some guidelines:

The red lines indicate the major anatomical constraints on drawing her torso - the line of the shoulders, the spine and, in the 'arrowhead' to the left, key points of the pelvis - the juncture of the spine and sacrum, the left and right iliac crests and the pubic symphisis. The blue lines follow the major bones of the leg - the tibia from ankle to knee and the femur from the knee upwards. Neither of these lines hits the pelvis where it ought to. They could be made to hit the pelvis by shortening the length of the femur but that would still leave problems with the head and neck of the femur and the insertion of the femur into the hip socket.

To finish, here's a reconstruction of the torso and legs, using those red and blue lines as guides to the placement of the outlines.

Disturbing at so many levels.

iPillory

Get your brickbats and rotten vegies out and take a shot at Lynne Tziolas. Today you can either denounce her as a barbarian at Andy Bolt's place, or join a more nuanced, conformitarian mob at catallaxy.

An Internet Wingnut Is Something to Be

Scientist-emeritus Jennifer Marohasy and fearless, independent journalist Andy Bolt (who, unlike those poor sods at The Age, doesn't have to toe an editorial line on global warming and is at little risk of finding his opinions on other issues in conflict with those of his proprietor) are singing the praises of Lawrence Solomon, whom you've only just heard of. Solomon is a journalist at Canada's National Post and he's won acclaim for reporting, last Saturday, on how his attempts to correct an "inaccurate" Wikipedia page were thwarted by a "global-warming zealot".

As I'm writing this column for the Financial Post, I am simultaneously editing a page on Wikipedia. I am confident that just about everything I write for my column will be available for you to read. I am equally confident that you will be able to read just about nothing that I write for the page on Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia page is entitled Naomi Oreskes, after a professor of history and science studies at the University of California San Diego, but the page offers only sketchy details about Oreskes. The page is mostly devoted to a notorious 2004 paper that she wrote, and that Science journal published, called "Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change." This paper analyzed articles in peer-reviewed journals to see if any disagreed with the alarming positions on global warming taken by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. "Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position," Oreskes concluded...

...When Oreskes's paper came out, it was immediately challenged by science writers and scientists alike, one of them being Benny Peiser, a prominent U.K. scientist and publisher of CCNet, an electronic newsletter to which I and thousands of others subscribe. CCNet daily circulates articles disputing the conventional wisdom on climate change. No publication better informs readers about climate-change controversies, and no person is better placed to judge informed dissent on climate change than Benny Peiser.

If you're like me, you've never heard of Benny Peiser either - turns out he's a social anthropologist "with particular research interest in human and cultural evolution [whose] research focuses on the effects of environmental change and catastrophic events on contemporary thought and societal evolution." With those qualifications and research interests, it's no wonder he's so well placed to judge informed dissent on the subject of climate change.

Solomon contacted Peiser, was told that the Wikipedia page had got its facts wrong - particularly on Peiser - and decided to set the record straight:

For this reason, when visiting Oreskes's page on Wikipedia several weeks ago, I was surprised to read not only that Oreskes had been vindicated but that Peiser had been discredited. More than that, the page portrayed Peiser himself as having grudgingly conceded Oreskes's correctness.

Upon checking with Peiser, I found he had done no such thing. The Wikipedia page had misunderstood or distorted his comments. I then exercised the right to edit Wikipedia that we all have, corrected the Wikipedia entry, and advised Peiser that I had done so.

Peiser wrote back saying he couldn't see my corrections on the Wikipedia page. Had I neglected to save them after editing them, I wondered. I made the changes again, and this time confirmed that the changes had been saved. But then, in a twinkle, they were gone again! I made other changes. And others. They all disappeared shortly after they were made.

That's right, Solomon started a Wikipedia edit war. On one side, Lawrence Solomon, determined defender of truth on the other:

...Someone called Tabletop was undoing my edits, and, following what I suppose is Wikietiquette, also explained why. "Note that Peiser has retracted this critique and admits that he was wrong!" Tabletop said.

I undid Tabletop's undoing of my edits, thinking I had an unassailable response: "Tabletop's changes claim to represent Peiser's views. I have checked with Peiser and he disputes Tabletop's version."

Tabletop undid my undid, claiming I could not speak for Peiser.

Why can Tabletop speak for Peiser but not I, who have his permission?, I thought. I redid Tabletop's undid and protested: "Tabletop is distorting Peiser. She does not speak for him. Peiser has approved my description of events concerning him."

Tabletop parried: "We have a reliable source to this. What Peiser has said to *you* is irrelevant."

Tabletop, it turns out, has another name: Kim Dabelstein Petersen. She (or he?) is an editor at Wikipedia...

Thanks to Solomon's article in the National Post, the (Solomon instigated) edit war came to the attention of higher authorities at Wikipedia:

I should NOT be reading about content disputes on Wikipedia in my Saturday National Post!

• There is a existing process for resolving content. See Wikipedia:Dispute resolution for full details.
  
• I've already seen and dealt with a case regarding content disputes that have made it to national media (see the Pat Binns dispute). Enough is enough especially when the edit war over this page gets on my daily newspaper! If I continue to see a edit war, I will recommend this page be protected, until we sort out what's going on. I've already contacted an admin, and I suggest the two of you cool it off.

ThePointblank (talk) 10:38, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

The editor in question doesn't seem to want to discuss his edits. But keeps putting in information that is prohibited by amongst others WP:BLP, WP:NPOVWP:SPS. The onus of convincing others that their contributions uphold these guidelines lies on the contributer. If you have anything specific that you find questionable about the reverts - then i suggest that you comment on the specifics. And please don't tag the regulars. --Kim D. Petersen (talk) 10:55, 12 April 2008 (UTC)

Solomon didn't win himself any credibility with the Wikipedia contributors by continually referring to Kim D. Petersen as "she" after naming "her" in his article when a check of Kim D. Petersen's profile would have shown that the proper pronouns to use were "he" and "his".

Solomon finishes his live blogging of the edit war with this warning:

While I've been writing this column, the Naomi Oreskes page has changed 10 times. Since I first tried to correct the distortions on the page, it has changed 28 times. If you have read a climate change article on Wikipedia -- or on any controversial subject that may have its own Kim Dabelstein Petersen -- beware. Wikipedia is in the hands of the zealots.

Judging from Solomon's own conduct, that warning should equally be applied to climate change articles in the Canada National Post, and articles on any controversial subject that might have its own Lawrence Sullivan. The same cautious approach is warranted when reading the posts of bloggers who publish links from readers' tip offs without doing a little background checking.

Anti-PC Beat Up of the Week

This time it's Andrew Bolt, gunning for the Gaians. In response to this report that a group of Swiss ethicists have published a report on the rights of plants Andrew huffs: "Slowly, slowly, humans are being denied the right to exist."

The Swiss ethicists in question are the members of Switzerland's Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH) "appointed by the Federal Council to advise the authorities from an ethical perspective, as an independent expert committee, in the field of non-human biotechnology and gene technology." According to the ECHN web-site:

The [Swiss] Federal Constitution requires "account to be taken of the dignity of creation when handling animals, plants and other organisms". The ECNH’s key tasks include putting this concept into concrete terms.

So, are the Swiss the first nation in the world to adopt Gaianism as their national religion? Not if the preamble to the Swiss constitution is any guide:

Preamble
In the name of God Almighty!
We, the Swiss People and the Cantons,
being mindful of our responsibility towards creation,
in renewing our alliance to strengthen liberty and democracy, independence and peace in solidarity and openness towards the world,
determined, with mutual respect and recognition, to live our diversity in unity,
conscious of our common achievements and our responsibility towards future generations,
certain that free is only who uses his freedom, and that the strength of a people is measured by the welfare of the weak,
hereby adopt the following Constitution:

Far from being a Gaian push to legislate humans out of existence the ECHN report (PDF format) is a good example of what happens when you try to mix religion and political constitutions. Andy should look a little closer to home if he wants someone to get huffy with.

Anti-PC Beat Up of the Week

Oteha Valley School in Auckland has achieved global notoriety with a "ban" on children bringing birthday cake to school. In the most recent edition of the school newsletter the principal of Oteha Valley School made the following request to parents:

The tradition [of] taking a cake or sweets to the preschool centre on your child’s birthday has moved into schools over the past few years. However, the Ministry of Education’s new National Administrative Guidelines for healthy eating will not encompass birthday treats... We still love to celebrate your child’s birthday with them but, as from the beginning of Term 2, please do not send any food to share with the class.

I'm not sure when this "tradition" started, or how. My guess is that it's a fairly recent development, started by some status-conscious pander of a parent who decided that their special child wasn't getting their fair share of recognition at the local kinder. Someone who figured that the way to improve their snotty little brat's popularity was to bribe the other kiddies. You can imagine the playground conversations about the little bugger can't you: "Tarquin might be a nathty little thit, but hith mummy maketh real nithe birthday caketh."

By the time I learnt of the story (through Bernard Slattery's blog, Bernard being something of a go-to guy if you're looking for ridiculous anti-PC media beat-ups) that request had been turned into an order:

Oteha Valley School in Auckland has told parents not to allow their children to bring birthday cakes to school for friends to share, The New Zealand Herald reported Friday. (AFP)

CHILDREN in a New Zealand school have been banned from taking cakes to the classroom to share on their birthdays, due to new government guidelines on healthy eating. (The Scotsman, for crying out loud)

In keeping with standard tabloid practice, none of the outlets who carried the "PC killjoys deprive kiddies of birthday cake" bothered with the school's side of the story or checked the school newsletter. Other news organisations weren't so slack:

The principal of an Auckland primary school says the media seems more upset about a ban on birthday cakes than parents are...

Principal Megan Bowden says there were no qualms from students about the loss of their birthday tradition - which has attracted nationwide attention.(New Zealand's TV3)

With 400 students, there is a birthday at least every day at the school. Baking was flying in the door, and Principal Megan Bowden had no choice but to place a ban on the humble birthday cake.

Bowden says the government's healthy food guidelines are one of the reasons for the ban.

But she says many parents were also thinking that it was compulsory to provide birthday cake.

"We think parents shouldn't have to pay out extravagant money just to bring cake to school for their children's birthday. There are lots of other ways of celebrating a children's birthday without having to share food."

Bowden says some parents like to manage what their kids eat, and are unable to do that if dessert is being provided at school.

She estimates sometimes a classroom would have up to four cakes in a week before the ban. (TVNZ

That's right, TV3 and TVNZ actually talked to the school's principal before they got on their high horses about cake-deprived kiddie victims of political correctness and wowserism. The real story, it turns out, is this - a school principal decided to ask parents to desist from a practice that might have been putting other parents to unnecessary expense and undermining the authority of those weird, abberant parents who want their kids to have a healthy diet. That seems an entirely appropriate way to deal with the issue.

One question to finish with - who is actually being deprived here? Is it the kids, or is it those idiot parents who take pride in the fact that little Tarquin always has the biggest and best cake to take to school on his birthday? Think about it.

Randomised Trials in Education - Towards A Practical Approach

Dr Andrew Leigh of the Australian National University, would like to see public policy become more evidence based, particularly in the field of education. He has suggested that randomised trials of the effects of factors such as teachers' salaries and class sizes on educational outcomes would be desirable, to give policy makers, and the rest of us, the information needed to make sound decisions on education policy. In this post I will outline a practical scheme for conducting such a randomised trial.

The trial will require at least four schools. Due to the rigorous controls that are outlined below, these schools will need to be newly constructed - I propose that a National Institute of Experimental Education (NIEE) be established, to manage these experimental schools. Specific details of school organisation are detailed below.

For a trial on the effects of class sizes and teachers salaries four distinct school regimes are needed:

School One: a school with low teacher pay and large class sizes;
School Two: a school with low teacher pay and small class sizes;
School Three: a school with high teacher pay and large class sizes;
School Four: a school with high teacher pay and small class sizes.

This requirement is dictated by the difficulty of constructing an appropriate control group for such a randomised trial; a control group of children who are not schooled at all might create problems for Australian society at large and it is difficult to identify anything that might serve as an educational placebo.

Blinding - of the kind applied in clinical trials of medical treatments - will be difficult but not impossible.

First, students in each of the schools must be kept in ignorance of the existence of the other schools in the trial, and indeed, the existence of any schools unlike the one that they are attending. This can be achieved by drafting representative random samples of children of school entry entry age from all states. The Federal Parliament will need to pass legislation conferring this power on the NIEE.

Similarly, teachers must be selected at random - without regard for experience or competence - from across the states, and the National Institute of Experimental Education will need the power to draft teachers in this way. Teachers drafted to the NIEE will be placed on strict employment contracts stipulating, in particular, that in no way are they to alert the students to the fact that an NIEE school is not a normal school. Heavy sanctions, possibly including criminal penalties, will be imposed on any NIEE teacher breaching this term of their employment contract.

To rigorously control for possible exogenous factors (such as differences in home environment), all students at NIEE schools will be boarders. A rigorous security regime to ensure their separation from the outside world will be maintained. To prevent students inadvertently learning of the existence of other schools which might differ from their own, students will have no access to radio, television, print media or the internet.

A viable first trial would consist of six years of primary education under such conditions, followed by release of half of the experimental students into the general population, where their academic performance in secondary school would be closely monitored.

The other half of the experimental population would receive a further six years of schooling under the above conditions, and their performance on standard university entrance examinations analysed. After their release into the general population, NIEE researchers would monitor their performance in tertiary education.

Longitudinal monitoring of NIEE schooled students is also indicated to establish the effects of these four distinct educational regimes in preparing students for stable employment and social relationships.

Thoughtcrime

The Hate rose to its climax. The voice of Goldstein had become an actual sheep's bleat, and for an instant the face changed into that of a sheep. Then the sheep-face melted into the figure of a Eurasian soldier who seemed to be advancing, huge and terrible, his sub-machine gun roaring, and seeming to spring out from the surface of the screen, so that some of the people in the front row actually flinched backwards in their seats. But in the same moment, drawing a deep sigh of relief from everybody, the hostile figure melted into the face of Big Brother ...

As the ministry staff filed out of the room to return to their work, there was a murmur of discussion of the artistic merits of the day's hate. Syme, who was working on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary declared that he found the mise-en-scene in the opening sequence particularly effective. Winston winced at the term mise-en-scene. It wasn't just OldSpeak, it was the affected Bourgeois dialect of Oldspeak, another indication that Syme with his careless enthusiasms was headed for vaporisation. Parsons loudly declared that anyone who wasn't moved by the sheer technical brilliance of today's Hate was obviously a traitor to Ingsoc - a stock opinion that he repeated every day. He glared around looking for signs of treason but every face upon which his glance fell showed the same enthusiastic approbation of today's film.

Word of the Day: petty

petty adj ... 1 unimportant; trivial (petty complaints). 2 small-minded, mean, contemptible (petty revenges)
...

A handy little word petty - both of those two usages (from the Australian Pocket Oxford) are very apt when it comes to the blogosphere - it's full of people writing about unimportant trivial things (their dogs, their cats, their knitting, their artistic aspirations) and occasionally indulging in some petty revenges. Past experience shows that I'm not above it and recent experience here at this blog shows that even some of the petty* oracles of the newspaper op-ed pages aren't above it either.

Thanks to Sitemeter, I've noticed a couple of spikes in traffic recently - one last week, and one today. They've come from Andrew Bolt's blog, via this Google cache page. The original blog page is here. You'd be hard put to find any difference between the Google cache version and the original page, because the original hasn't been touched in four years. The page certainly hasn't been deleted, despite the fact that some of the contents - in particular a post on Bolt where I got it signally wrong - are a bit of an embarrassment.

The most embarrassing thing about that 2004 post is that, having wrongly accused Bolt of verballing a Federal Court judge, I found myself with a little "boy who cried wolf" problem in September 2005. See "The Extended O'Loughlin J" on this page. Or the Google cache version if you suspect that I've got at it in the past five minutes.

I'm not sure what Bolt is trying to achieve with all this linkage he's been providing me lately - perhaps he's decided to cash in a few get squares for all the bad things I've written about him in the past. Still, they're the sort of get-squares a less petty man might come to regret. Slipping a petty revenge on a minor blogger into a post paying out on Jenny Macklin doesn't really look a lot like cool, clear-headed analysis.

* - 3 minor, inferior, on a small scale (petty princes) [op cit]

Environmental Movements in pre-History

It all started with a bunch of proto-human hominids living those rift valleys on the east coast of Africa. The rift valleys provided a fairly substantial slab of environment but, as the number of proto-hominids increased, they noted that for some reason, there was getting to be less and less environment to go around as time went on.

Eventually things declined to the point where there was a lot of proto-bickering about who should get to use which bits of the limited supply of the environment, and how often, and so on and so forth. The end result of this proto-political process was most likely that the upstarts who were demanding more of the environment(the proto-progressives) were kicked out of the rift valleys by those who already held the territory (the proto-conservatives). This was a proto-win-win-solution; the proto-conservatives were rid of the unwanted disruptive element, while the proto-progressives discovered that there was a lot more environment outside the rift valleys. This event was the beginning of the prehistoric era of environmental movements.

During this prehistoric era, the initial experience of kicking those disruptive proto-progressives out the clan or tribal territory to go off and find a new bit of environment where they could fulfil their proto-utopian fantasies (or perhaps their utopian proto-fantasies - in the absence of more information on prehistoric human psychology, it could be either) was repeated over tens of thousands of years as humanities ancestors spread first through Africa, then into Europe.

The pre-historic era of environmental movements ended roughly 40,000 years ago when a group of human settled a large, rather arid island continent that would later be dubbed Terra Nullius. From that point onwards, the option of taking off to find a new hitherto unused slab of environment when you found yourself with not enough environment to go round was no longer available.