Keeping high policy uninformed

Just published (2008-05-15) in Nature (doi:10.1038/453257a) is The Next Big Climate Challenge, which argues that significant funding is needed for climate modellers.  Indeed that climate modelling and the supercomputing grunt it requires should be considered as international "big science", with projects funded internationally in the same manner (although hopefully more effective) than CERN’s hadron smasher and space telescopes.

Policy cannot be informed without information.  Localized climate policy requires localized models.  This means big computers and big bucks, given that current models and the computers they run on are limited to "cells" of about 100km, enough to be certain there is a problem, but not good enough to inform hard practical policy decisions.

And even higher resolutions — a kilometre or less, say — may well be needed to handle such critical issues as cloud formation realistically.  Hence the need for computers a couple of
generations beyond the current state of the art.

Didn’t see any of this in Penny Wong’s 2008-05-14 Media Statement about $2.3B in four years to tackle climate change, did we?

There’s money to "adapt", but adapt to what?  How will agriculture be affected, and in what areas?  What do we do if a metropolis will get more rainfall than productive land (farmland and water catchments) a hundred kilometres away?

The Nature article points to the need for public purses to put climate modelling on the best computers in the world, which are now often limited for use…

in areas of national security such as communications intelligence or nuclear weapons design. And climate prediction is a national security issue if ever there was one.

It smells like the budget money is all about scoring political points for "doing something", rather than figuring out what are the right things to do.

---

See Also:

• "They say they want a revolution" Nature Online (2008-05-14) doi:10.1038/453268a
  

  Climate scientists call for major new modelling facility.

• "Warming world altering thousands of natural systems" Nature Online (2008-05-14) doi:10.1038/news.2008.823
  

  Analysis shows effects of climate change on almost 30,000 biological and physical phenomena.

• "The Next Big Climate Challenge" Nature (2008-05-14) doi:10.1038/453257a

Oz Chinese studies: speak or read?

When politicians call for increased teaching of Asian languages (presumably with an emphasis on Chinese), I wonder if they have thought of the difference between written and spoken capabilities.

For one thing, there seem to be genetic differences between populations that use pitch as part of the spoken language (tonal languages, e.g. Mandarin), and those that don’t (non-tonal languages e.g. Proto-Indo-European).  Occidental populations thus face significant hurdles to learning spoken Mandarin.

Computers for kids or money for Microsoft?

The One Laptop Per Child has set up their Australian Arm, but according to the SMH 2008-05-07:

The Education Minister, Julia Gillard, and the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, did not respond to calls requesting comment.

Any politician concerned with providing educational computing should have been fully aware of OLPC ages ago, have formed an opinion, and able to comment.  Gillard and Conroy should be extremely embarrased.

Does the Rudd government want to put more computing power in the hands of children, or more dollars in the hands of large computer companies, computer retailers, and Microsoft?

ANU proposal silly

Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of participatory democracy, which is why the ANU Deliberative Democracy Project seems so darn silly.

It proposes merely another forum, the "Citizen’s Parliament" which "will be composed of one person selected from each of Australia?s 150 federal electoral districts, constituting a diversity of citizens reflective of the broader public".

Why would this means of getting one person per electorate be any more productive and representative of broad public opinion (or more usefully, considered and informed opinion) than the current method?

Dawkins should promote quackery

Richard Dawkins in "Enemies of Reason: The Irrational Health Service" perhaps kicked an own-goal if his aim is a rational society as soon and as resilient as possible.

We should be not attacking faith-based treatments, but encouraging people to use them.  As an evolutionary biologist, Dawkins should understand the selective advantage this would give those humans who are more rational than others.

With promotion of pseudo-scientific and faith-based health treatment, the more credulous and less desirable humans would gradually be removed from the gene (and meme) pool.

Plug for a Sub-Prime Primer

What can I say?  The BusinessPundit has done it again with a brilliant low-fi cartoon slideshow The Sub-Prime Primer.  Spot on!

It ain’t flashy, but it is brilliantly accurate.

Hat tip, Zombinol

How to fail a maths student

Here are a couple of questions I’d use to fail any year 11 maths student who got them wrong, or even looked horrified when given the questions.

I wonder if anybody else has questions with a similar attititude?

I’d give the students a pen, three sheets of paper, forbid use of calculators, slide rules and reference materials.  I’d tell them if they have five minutes per question, and if they don’t complete the task, any working on paper of the problem will be taken into account.  I wouldn’t tell them the two questions are related.

It’s shocking how many look at you as if the task was impossible!  Discussion over the fold.

Question 1: Attempt to calculate, to at least 6 decimal places, the natural logarithm of the square root of e.

Question 2: Given the base 10 log of 2 is 0.30, approximate, to two significant digits, the base 10 log of 7.  Indicate if the correct value is likely to be higher or lower.

AFL doesn’t want a national competition

It’s hard not to be cynical about the AFL wanting to expand the competition to include two new teams, when there is a perfectly good region that has been loving footy (and supplying many stars back in the VFL days) for over a century that doesn’t have a team: Tasmania.  Then there is the Northern Territory (although playing there in the hot weather might be troublesome).

Another Sydney team?  One in the Gold Coast?

If the AFL wanted two new teams, and tells the truth about the desire to make footy a national competition, then the next team should be Hobart, followed by either Launceston or Darwin.

(Although, perhaps the AFL is worried about the push for an Uncle-Nephew rule to supplement the Father-Son rule… just kidding!)

Would Samson have been a good software engineer?

When Samson cut his hair, his strength left him, or so the story goes.  Recently a thread has been resurrected with lots of photos about the relationships between beards and language success.

Now, just as the authors note that moustaches are the fly-in-the-ointment of the theory (big moustaches a la Larry Wall’s are as effective on software success as beards), the other way of obscuring the face with hair can involve simple long hair without beard or moustache (the Cousin It method).

“Human Rights” - a regressive concept

It sounds contradictory, but because I am a progressive, I don’t want a "human rights" bill introduced, indeed I think the term "human rights" should be considered politically incorrect, and a "human rights" bill might be a win for regressives.

KRudd and Kreativty

The kreatif 2020 tipes ar shone up in the foto of Krud in frunt of a witebord piblushd in The Economist.  Badd speling is neaded fur kreativty.

Over the fold is a photograph from the 2008-04-24 The Economist article "Green, no queen: Kevin Rudd’s reformist zeal", which has "Teacher Rudd at his whiteboard" (or p39 of the 2008-04-26 print edition).

He looks slightly shellshocked.  Has he just realised what the photo shows, or were all the gabfesters’ brains burnt out by so much hard thinking?

• Is this the basis for a future Liberal Party advertisement?
• Do any of you have suggestions for a caption?
• Does anyone recognize the handwriting?

Here’s the description just in case the photo disappears from the blog:

Happier workers = more productivity = better profits

It’s time the "flexible working conditions" hypocrites (who really mean "screw the worker, I’ll treat them not as people but quickly-replaced production units" ) learnt something from Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge series.

"The New Math of Customer Relationships" (2008-04-21) makes it crystal clear:

It’s the E=mc² of customer loyalty.
Deeply satisfied employee = deeply satisfied customer = lifelong profit.

Did anyone at the 2020 gabfest push the "better conditions for workers and we’ll be more productive" idea?

2020: obfuscating the REAL agenda

While the media and politicians talked about moving to a republic as the "big idea" from the 2020 stream on "The future of Australian governance: open government (including the role of the media), the structure of government and the rights and responsibilities of citizens", my sampling of 30-odd submissions from that stream shows a completely different focus.

Apart from off-topic submissions, those from the Australian Republican Movement, and those from schools (where a republic was included as a leading question in the "discussion points" presented to them by the government), only one mentioned a republic.

So, what were the dominant themes of submissions on the future of governance?

Spam RSS more informative than politicians

You’d expect the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (or at least his highly-paid spinners) to be net-savvy enough to produce a usable news feed.  Think again.

An 8 year old using a freebie blogging service can do better than those who are supposed to be leading us into the future, the expert in innovation and industry!

He is not the only one: just about every single one of the Australian Government’s media releases (point your feedreader to http://media.australia.gov.au/rss.cgi) has the same headline, the same teaser body, or both are the same.

Back to Kim Carr’s feed:

Each item has the same heading and teaser - not exactly useful to people who want to keep an eye on what our political overlords are saying.  Perhaps our representatives don’t want their mouthings easily discovered by people with the interest and expertise to debunk their propaganda and decisions.

OK, I fibbed about each feeditem being exactly the same: the embedded date changes, but that’s all.  Obscuring the date, each feeditem from Kim Carr is as follows:

• Headline: Minister - Innovation, Industry, Science and Research
• Teaser Body: What’s New EMAIL UPDATES SITE INDEX FEEDBACK IISR Minister Senator the Hon Kim Carr Print this page Email this page Media Release Senator the Hon Kim Carr DD Mon YYYY. Sign In

KRudd and Gillard’s feeds at least have different headlines that let you know the subject, but again, what appears in the body of the item in your Google Reader is useless, and as follows:

What brand beer did Gilgamesh drink?

Those who’ve hit one of my most popular posts, (a Gilgamesh ultra-short version and review) might find it interesting that "brand names" started appearing on bottles at the same time.

"Were Mesopotamians the first brand-addicts?" (New Scientist 2008-04-25) points to David Wengrow’s Prehistories of Commodity Branding a.k.a. DOI: 10.1086/523676.

Wengrow’s papers are discoverable via Google Scholar.  He’s heavily into Mesopatamia and the Urban revolution: you can browse his The Archaeology of Ancient Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East Africa 10000BC to 2650BC about the emergence of farming economies and dynastic states at Google Books for free, here.

Here is the abstract - the paper is US$10