For relief from the continuing series of posts on use and rights of Public Service Information in Victoria, it’s time to ask readers about their favorite Uncyclopedia article, in the same vein as the question about your favorite xkcd, and a post that morphed into a thread on your favorite Tom Lehrer.

(For those who are unaware, Uncyclopedia is a spoof of wikipedia, with pages varying in quality, but the best are almost believable until you read carefully.  Either that… or they are all too true, as you can see by comparing Bogan on wikipedia with Bogan on uncyclopedia).

Perhaps my favorite is the one on Murphy’s law application for antigravitatory cats which involves sticking buttered toast (butter up) on the back of a cat.

Even in weaker articles, there are some gems, such as the following line from the Brendan Nelson page:

He originally began his political career as a member of the Australian Labor Party, but soon switched to the Liberal Party where he thought he could better support the ALP’s cause.

Other suggestions likely to appeal to readers of this blog:

• John Howard
  

  He has a reputation of being compassionate for people who cannot swim, mainly by teaching them how to swim in the middle of the pacific ocean with no prospect of survival.

• Kevin Rudd
  

  Whoops! Maybe you were looking for working families?

• Bogan
  

  In addition to the above, many Bogans are also connoisseurs of fine literature, as embodied by the likes of FHM, Ralph and Zoo magazine. These preferred publications explore a number of important and progressive topics, such as whether fake breasts are better than real breasts, whether women should ’sunbake’ topless, how many beers you can drink in one go to ’sneak’ them past stadium security at the SCG, and so forth.”

• Sarah Palin
  

  Sarah Palin Debate Flow Chart

• Cicero
  

  Cicero made his name in a famous court case. Pro Rustico Amoricum (In defense of the yokel lover) pitted the young Cicero against Sulla’s favorite Chrysogonos (Golden Gonads), who had been up to all sorts of nasty tricks whenever Sulla was asleep post-coito – which was pretty much all the time. Cicero won the case – or as the joke went – "The golden tongue licked the golden gonads".

If you detect something familiar about that snippet on Cicero, and the Catullus LIX (but not the entire page)… funny about that.

Anyway, over to you to nominate your fave(s) …. and a tip… Malcolm Turnbull and Gordon Grech don’t have a page.

Another important public consultation hidden away in a media statement and in the backblocks of a departmental website…. don’t you wish that all announcements of government consultations were tagged by subject and aggregated into a consolidated RSS feed?

This consultation is on waste policy, announced in Peter Garrett’s media release (2009-07-08), and you can send submissions to wastepolicy@environment.gov.au until close-of-business 2009-07-31.

The main consultation page is here, with the discussion paper available as PDF and (yuk!) Microsoft RTF.  You’d think they’d be able to have a nice HTML version, wouldn’t you?  Naaaaa, too sensible… people might be able to read them on there phone… cannot have that!

Submissions to an earlier stage of the process are available here.

I’ve had a quick look at the draft policy framework.  24 pages only.  Anything it in actually actionable policy or hard timelines or standards?  Hardly!  Most of it is fluffier than an election advertorial.

The discussion paper that led up to the so-called policy framework is almost three times as long, and actually (unlike the policy framework) includes the odd number or two (apart from page and section numbers) that might be plugged into your calculator.  The subtitle on the consultation "Managing waste to 2020".

2020, 2020, 2020… a number that will probably become a synonym in Australia for empty promises, faux inclusiveness, and motherhood statements.  I wonder how long it will be before our political overlords realise this and start to avoid the term "2020", until it is in hindsight: "we could have got this done back in 2020, but…"

Notes/See Also

• By the way, look at the difference in the mug-shot between the media announcement at environment.gov.au and alp.org.au.  Happy to be a minister, but not happy being a member of the ALP?
   
• Did you look at the list of submissions to the earlier stage in the process?  Note how many are left ONLY as Microsoft-specific documents without even the availability of a PDF, HTML or text version?  IDIOTS!!!  I wonder if they’ve even been checked for macro viruses.

This post continues the series on the recommendations from the Victorian inquiry into use of Public Sector Information (PSI), following on from others detailed at the bottom of this post.

8. That the Victorian Government encourage as part of its funding agreements with research agencies and higher education institutions that research results be deposited in open access journals or repositories.  The Government should consider providing additional funds to these agencies to allow them to publish in open access journals that charge a fee for publication.

This is a particularly good recommendation, with PLoS being an example of an excellent peer-reviewed open-access journal (although it mainly concentrates at the moment on biomedical research, this is perhaps the research that Victoria is most famous for).

There are two "howevers":

• If the research team has a chance of being published in Nature (and other journals in the same stable), it would be mean to deny the team the kudos of such a publisher.  Perhaps it might be worth developing such a list of journals.
   
• I’m a bit dubious about "open access" journals that demand a fee for publication – Bentham Publishers infamously accepted a nonsense paper recently as discussed in "Peerless Prank" (2009-06-12), seemingly more interested in the money from authors than the quality of the work.

9. That the Victorian Government encourage divisions operating in the fields of biological innovation and research, including biotechnology development, to consider participating in the BiOS licensing system.

The BiOS licensing system (managed by CAMBIA which seems centred around Canberra) is not quite what the open source movement would consider "open", in that "members" only promise not to go after other "members" for patents violations.

Unfortunately, the patents covered explicitly include materials and methods – which opens up all sorts of abuses, especially where patents offices worldwide have problems identifying prior art.  Still, BiOS is better than nothing, may keep squatters at bay, and provides greater opportunities for start-ups.

Browsing through the (relatively short for an organization that has been operating so long) BiOS Licensed Patents Inventory, I see quite a few things that cover the sorts of things discussed in the recent Senate Gene Patents Inquiry (see also my posts about this inquiry via the "See Also" at the bottom of this post).

But what about other areas of research?  Software tools developed by government agencies or with government funding could be deposited (and maintained, even without government funding) at places like SourceForge, just like the Xena Digital Preservation Tool developed by the National Archives.

Perhaps CAMBIA can be "upgraded" so that it covers patents outside agriculture specifically and life sciences generally.  I certainly would be in favor of upgrading CAMBIA rather than creating similar organizations for other research domains.

But would we not be better encouraging more use of the ScienceCommons initiative, which is worldwide, has the public interest as the major stakeholder, and is not limited to the biosciences?  That way, Australia’s funding burden of open-access science would be much lower – leaving more money to spend on actual research!  If we wanted to spend the same amount of money as we do supporting CAMBIA, why not second public service lawyers to the ScienceCommons initiative?

10. That the Victorian Government encourage departments to identify and publish materials under NEALS to allow these materials to be used freely for educational purposes by Australian schools.

The National Education Access Licence for Schools is an opt-in agreement between various Australian Governments (with WA the least helpful) to minimize copyright fees for materials used for education.

NEALS is a licence agreement between educational bodies of the various Australian States and Territories for schools.  It allows Australian schools and educational bodies to copy and communicate print and digital material for educational use in schools free of charge.  The Agreement covers both websites and publications.  All material published by Australian schools and educational bodies for educational purposes will automatically be covered by NEALS, unless it is expressly excluded.  The objective of NEALS is to reduce the copyright fees paid by Australian schools under Part VB of the Commonwealth of Australia Copyright Act. – source – DEST.gov.au

NEALS is a good thing if it helps cut costs in the same way as institutional subscriptions by universities to scientific journals provide cost-effective access to materials.  However, in practice, I get the impression that it mainly covers materials generated by Australian educational institutions and departments, in which case, NEALS would be an anachronism once PSI is truly open-access.

To see what can be done, it is worthwhile looking at all the course materials, both undergrad and postgrad, provided by OpenCourseware at MIT.

As an aside, if all course materials were copylefted, there would be interesting data from download records of lecture notes from universities, indicating which institutions and faculties produced the most useful notes, and possibly forming input into recurring funding of universities by government.

11. That the Victorian Government develop a consistent copyright licensing system for use across all government departments.

Implementing this should take about 5 minutes and could be completely covered in a two paragraph press release.

It’s called the Creative Commons Licence, probably involving the "Attribution Share-Alike" clauses similar to the CC licence for material I produce in this blog.

The Creative Commons Licence system has stood up in court, is widely understood, and would avoid any of the costs involved in drafting a consistent copyright licensing system within Victoria, or indeed Australia.

I’ve looked to see if the CC licenses preclude limited distribution (such as within Australian governments, but not released to the public), and cannot see such gotchas.  I’m not a lawyer though!

12. That the Victorian Government establish a central office to develop a copyright licensing system, and provide advice to government on government copyright.

Aarrrgghh!  Again, why have a central office and waste money developing an appropriate system for material that is released when the Creative Common Licence system is rock solid and costs us nothing?

If you accept the principle that PSI should be released to the public, if only as the default position, then anything drafted (especially in Victoria where agencies cannot get a grip on how to right a tight contract) will not be as good as the Creative Commons licence system, especially in non-Australian jurisdictions.

And why in the age of co-operative federalism and the internet should Victoria’s needs be any different from those of other Australian jurisdictions?   Even if you do want to waste money in a way antithetical to the thrust of the recommendations, why waste it multiple times?

13. That exclusive arrangements not be entered into for licensing Victorian Government public sector information, excepting exclusive rights necessary to protect the public interest.

Before the comma good, after the comma bad.

The jury has been in for some time, the public interest is best served by letting all information (not covered by security or privacy concerns) run wild, munged by as many innovative people as possible, and hopefully made easier to understand by visualizations such as those on the ManyEyes Project.

What public interest considerations could the weasels be considering?  Revenue streams from publication of books through an exclusive publisher?  Grrrrrr.  Do I smell a rat?  Yes, and not so honorable as Polonius (look what secrecy cost him!).

Section 2.2 of the EDIC Report is worth reading, as is the disingenuous spin in the finding of section 2.2.1, which subtly tones-down the inferences of studies showing the benefits of freed data, even though no information in the report (or even rock-solid comments from self-serving submissions) is available to contradict the studies in favor of free access PSI.

14. That the Victorian Government adopt the Creative Commons licensing model as the default licensing system for the Information Management Framework.

Nominating the Creative Commons licensing model is sensible, and section 6.3 of the report goes into details of the CC licences, along with the following:

CC licences are currently utilised by agencies in the Commonwealth and Queensland Governments. The Queensland Government estimates that CC licences will be applicable to 85 per cent of government PSI.

So, why the ambiguous wording in the recommendation that could be interpreted as meaning that the Information Management Framework itself should be put under a CC licence, rather than all PSI that should be publically released?

As noted earlier, there are various flavors of CC licence.  I cannot see why "Attribution" (the "-BY-" part of the CC-BY-SA licence for this blog) would inconvenience anyone but evil plagiarists, and the "Share Alike" rule can only be good for Victoria if someone outside Victoria value-adds to the data.

Enough for now… stay tuned.  Hopefully I’ll be feeling a bit better and the next installment won’t be sitting part-done in my drafts folder for so long.

See Also/Notes

• On gene patents:
  • "Gene Patents Inquiry – rubbery submission dates and overseas interest" (2009-03-26) reviews some of the submissions.
  • "Submission to Gene Patents Inquiry" (2009-03-19)
  • "Senate Inquiry into Gene Patents Open" (2008-11-21)
  • Gene Patents Inquiry Page which unusually has a link to vodcasts from a public forum "Should Genes Be Patented?"

   

• Previous posts on Victorian PSI recommendations:
  • Overview (2009-06-26)
  • Discussion of recommendations part 1 (2009-06-29)
  • Discussion of recommendations part 2 (2009-06-30)

   

• "Reuse of material in the context of education and research" (2009-07-06) at CreativeCommons.
   
• ScienceCommons is an offshoot of CreativeCommons for scientific and research materials.  It is possible that resources devoted to CAMBIA/BiOS might be better redirected to beefing up the legal clout of ScienceCommons.
   
• Mayer and Beetle explains CreativeCommons clauses in a cartoon (direct link here) form and a way that even children (and hopefully Victorian parliamentarians) can understand.  Admittedly, it has a focus on downloadable CC music – including among other sites, CCMixter which is specifically for music remixes, and OpSound which is geared more towards bands/performers who want to CC their music.  You can also Search CreativeCommonsed stuff.

Lurkers, repeat tourists, and regular readers are invited to comment on how I can be more useful to you, be it changes to article length, emphasis on topics, more references in the "See Also" lists…

While you can tell me to improve my use of language, I cannot promise much.

As to frequency of posts, while some with philosophical differences may want me to stop (this includes changing subject matter to fluffy kittens, celebrities, personal life…), and some with similar mindsets may want me to post more, your comments will be noted, but there are limits (unless large regular cash payments into my bank account are involved).

And do any of you browse my Eclectica feed of things catching my attention?

Update for memeweaver because of the comment thread, via an uncyclopedia article (and make sure you read the proposed inverse of the device and other documented uses for buttered toast and cats):

Perpetual Motion with Cat and Buttered Toast

So…. $60 billion over 4 years in a new defence capability plan… and the KRudd ministers (and the press) are spruiking it mainly because it will create 5000 jobs.

Given that the rule-of-thumb is that employing (and supporting with chairs, computers, tools of trade, etc) a typical team of 10 people costs $1 million, how does 5000 jobs for 60 billion over 4 years stack up?

5K jobs times 100K per annum each times 4 years…. thats 2 billion dollars over 4 years.

And those calculations are for direct employment, not even the fuzzy "job-multiplier" figures politicians love to use because they are difficult to prove wrong.

So, if the publically-admitted excusebenefit for the spend, the 5000 jobs, is correct, there are far more efficient ways of creating jobs and confidence in the economy.

For $15 billion dollars a year, you could directly employ a workforce of about 150000 people (and that’s not including the people employed indirectly).

So out of that 60 billion, there must be an awful lot of very expensive parts!  (Because it’s capital investment, not the cost of putting the petrol in the tanks).

On the other hand, the 60 billion over four years program could also be looked at from the point of view of increasing the workforce over four years from 29000 to 34000.

Even here, you’d want to have an awful lot of material used by each worker, but that can be the case if you are buying expensive parts.

Still, you wonder why the spruiking for the spend is talking about job creation.  There are much better ways of doing that, and ways that don’t scare the neighbors into upping their own military spending.

And it is the major spruiking point.  The only figures mentioned in the Faulkner’s press release are the 60 billion dollars, and the number of jobs.

Up until now, Faulkner has been one of the few federal ALP ministers that have impressed me by being more into improving accountability and management practice.  Even though the DMO has been woefully mismanaged for at least a decade, and could certainly use Faulkner’s skills, it’s sad to see him becoming more of a propagandist.

Unless we are expecting a fair-sized war in the next few years (perhaps our pollies expect Hawkish Republicans to get power in the US soon), it would be better to spend the money on much-needed infrastructure that might help our trade balance, and give us the money to spend on toys a little further down the track.

And in the next 2 or 3 years, our neighbors who are not joined-at-the-hip with the US will be upping their military spending, and we’ll have to spend even more money that we won’t have.

Still, if the general public looks on this massive spend favorable, swayed by the prospect of controlling inevitable unemployment rises (my guess is that it will be around or over 10% for the next year or two at least), then the politicians must be laughing, pleased at how few people are doing the maths at VCE level that all year 10 students covered only a few decades ago.

See Also

• Defence Capability Plan (DCP) announcement
   
• DCP 2009
   
• Defence Priority Industry Capability Factsheet (2009-07)
   
• There are hints the $60 billion Military Industrial Complex largesse will be boosted, the DCP announcement has the following:
  

  A number of substantial programs identified in the 2009 Defence White Paper, Defending Australia in the Asia Pacific Century: Force 2030 (the White Paper) are not included in this DCP as they will be presented for Government consideration beyond the Forward Estimates period. They are expected to be included in subsequent DCPs.

• Guns more important than mums" (2009-07-02) "marnic" at New Matilda
   
• ABC News (2009-07-01) on the $60 bill spend, and jobs.  At least it includes some information on how bad management was under Howard, and hints that Faulkner might be more efficient.
   
• Yeah, hope I’m wrong in this post (finger trouble with the calculator), but I don’t have time to go further into the figures and the details of those paper at the moment.

Following previous posts (here and here) on Public Sector Information (PSI) handling and access recommendations for the Victorian government, here are some discussions on more of the dot-points:

4. That the Victorian Government adopt a narrow definition for the public sector for the purpose of establishing the government Information Management Framework.  Initially this definition should comprise only Victorian Government departments.

Whenever I hear "narrow definition" or "broad definition" I become alert for escape clauses and weasel words.  This is no exception.

First, consider the following phrases:

• Data created or held by a government agency
• Data created or held by an agency of government.

These two phrases might seem equivalent.  You’d be correct in thinking that the rules governing the handling of the data are identical under legislation.  However, they are very different in the eyes of many public sector managers and the executive, all too eager to find any excuse to remove accountability for compliance with those rules.

Consider data associated with finding jobs for unemployed persons, and the links to unemployment benefits (or cessation of those benefits), remembering that such data has relevance for the unemployed individual (and the Privacy Act), and also for policy makers using aggregated data.

Is the aggregated information (such as the average number of job interviews per month per unemployed person) from an individual private sector organization carrying out activities as an agency of government included in this "narrow definition"?  If not, how does this affect the quality of conclusions based on the information created directly by the government agency, with the information from outsourced government service supplies hidden?  Will such data incompleteness give politicians an excuse not to act on conclusions based on the information that is publically available?

In between the government agency and a private organization acting as an agency of government are statutory authorities and quangos (like VicRoads).

Under a narrow definition of "Victorian Government departments, authorities such as VicRoads would be excluded, meaning that raw information about things like accident site statistics would not be covered by the Information Management Framework would not be subject to the default rule for public release.  Such information, which in the hands of an independent statistician could help save life and limb, could be hidden as a result.  This undermines the entire thrust of any open access PSI policy.

Remember that recommendation 4 is absolute, and has no qualitative or quantitative reference to time.

5. That implementation of the Information Management Framework be conducted via a staged approach, with the executive branch of the Victorian Government leading development of the framework, and encouraging other agencies and entities to adopt similar frameworks, in the following order:

• Victorian Government;
• Parliament of Victoria, the judicial system and statutory authorities; and
• other public sector agencies, including public hospitals and local councils.

While a staged approach to anything is usually sensible, the rules governing information management have been in place for a long time, and consistent across any organization acting as an agency of government.  As the requirements haven’t changed, then the staging process shouldn’t take much time.  If one agency of government can do it, even if it involves introduction of software (more on this later), the next agency of government should be able to do it very quickly.

Again, I see no mention of private organizations acting as agencies of government.  If these are excluded, how much incentive is there for managers to outsource even more things, with even sloppier contracts that don’t mention information handling requirements?

What is particularly interesting is that the Parliament of Victoria, which is relatively small compared to non-Parliamentary government agencies, and deals with information much more important to citizens than any individual agency, should probably be the first cab-off-the-rank for getting their act together, yet is defined for a later stage.  Why is this?

So much for lead-by-example!

Can anybody think up a single valid reason, something that could be admitted in public, why a smaller area that probably doesn’t hold any sensitive information about individuals, yet is of greater importance for the development of good public policy, and therefore has an easier task, not be first cab off the rank?

Consider a proper service-oriented data feed that included all legislation introduced into parliament, all inquiries and associated information, all voting patterns of legislators.  This is incredibly useful information to anybody who wants greater citizen involvement in policy development.  It is exactly the sort of data that can be usefully manipulated and filtered by groups of citizens.

6. That the Victorian Government, through individual departments, employ a systematic approach to identify materials for release and publish those materials on department websites.

It’s really quite simple here, and follows the standard principle in both law and information management disciplines (and a major rule-of-thumb for information security professionals):

So, given that any document (electronic or hardcopy, including raw data) should have been classified at the time of creation or editing, then this recommendation should read "systematic approaches to (i) identify information that should not be publically released and (ii) publishing materials for release on department websites.

Personally, I’d see the only valid systematic approach including not just publication on government websites, but using a central "clearing house" (similar to the Obama-created data.gov catalogs).  More important than merely publishing information on government websites, and perhaps as useful as making that information available to citizens, is the proper classification and availability by a clearing-house (that would have a consistent web-interface, both human and API) to those inside government so that the decision-makers have the best-quality information (accuracy, relevance and completeness) on which to base their decisions.

After all, just as citizens might "mash" data from one or more agencies, agencies themselves might create "mashups" of information from other agencies.  For example, the Transport Accident Commission might usefully mashup information from the health department (on medical interventions and incidents), VicRoads, and Victoria Police.

Similar considerations apply to use by government agencies outside of Victoria.  Even without public release, the availability in a form suitable for public release (but even without public release, which avoids the burdens of any decision as to whether that information should be publically released) and encouraging "mashups" would be incredibly useful for the federal government, both for politicians, and for decision-makers within federal agencies.

In this light, the only systematic approach to information management rules, including the rules for classification of information, must be co-ordinated across all levels of government.  I’m reasonably confident that AGIMO (and other expert federal agencies) are more competent than their equivalents at state (or council!!!) level.

7. That the Victorian Government seek legal advice to ensure it is fully covered for all areas of possible legal action that may arise from the release of public sector information.

This is one of the more interesting recommendations, because of the phrase "all areas of possible legal action".

One type of action is where information that should not be released, is released.  Privacy-related information is obviously in this category, but a less obvious one is where a private company claims to have been harmed by that release.

This perceived harm can itself come in at least two flavors: the loss of exclusive commercial rights to the information (putting aside that in my opinion, no non-government entity should have exclusive commercial rights to government information).  The other flavor is where information about a non-government organization is released, leading to things like loss of market share (just think of various "Price Watch" initiatives).

Yet another case relates to the consequences of the government releasing poor-quality information.

On the quality-of-information issue, it’s worth looking at relevant bits from the policy pages at data.gov:

For all data accessed through Data.gov, each agency has confirmed that the data being provided through this site meets the agency’s Information Quality Guidelines.
…
Data accessed through Data.gov do not, and should not, include controls over its end use. However, as the data owner or authoritative source for the data, the submitting Department or Agency must retain version control of datasets accessed. Once the data have been downloaded from the agency’s site, the government cannot vouch for their quality and timeliness. Furthermore, the US Government cannot vouch for any analyses conducted with data retrieved from Data.gov.

So… here are my opinions of legal impacts:

• Governments must be held accountable if privacy-related information is released that should not be released.  That’s simple.
• Governments must be held accountable for any impacts of poor-quality data coming out of government.  That’s simple too.
• Legal action on loss of exclusive commercial use of information is tricky.  It would have been easy if the sensible policy of not allowing exclusive commercial use had been standard practice.
• If accurate information (e.g. price comparisons), not subject to privacy considerations causes a loss to a company, then the company should wear the loss.

Of course, the much more interesting legal actions would involve the consequences of the government not releasing information that should have been released according to the information management framework and associated determinations and guidelines.  That’s the doozy for the politicians!  Personally, I’d say if release of certain types of information is required of government, then the government should be accountable for failure to fulfil its obligations.

(Legal and political philosophers can now go away and argue whether such failures to release appropriate information flouts the social contract).

That’s enough for today.  Stay tuned for more.

Let’s start going into some of my detailed thoughts about the various recommendations for improving access to Victorian public sector information (PSI) and data produced by a Victorian Parliamentary Committee.

While I’m writing specifically in a Victorian context, any arguments and observations can be applied to any jurisdiction, at any level, in Australia.

1. That the Victorian Government release a public statement indicating that it endorses open access as the default position for the management of its public sector information.

This is pretty simple, and it’s hard to think of anyone arguing otherwise.  The tricky bit comes with what exactly is meant by "open access", and how loosely defined are the rules that allow exceptions from the default position.

But… are they including information collected in the first instance by councils?  By outsourced service providers carrying out work on behalf of government?  If not, why not?  (More on this in future posts on recommendations that are further down the list)

2. That the Victorian Government develop a whole-of-government Information Management Framework (IMF) with the following key features:

• that the object of the IMF is to promote and facilitate increased access to and re-use of Victorian public sector information (PSI) by government, citizens, and businesses;
   
• that the default position of the IMF be that all PSI is made available;
   
• that the IMF define and describe criteria under which access to PSI may be restricted, or released under licence;
   
• that PSI made available under the IMF be priced at no cost or marginal cost; and
   
• that the IMF establish a systematic and consistent whole-of- government methodology for categorisation, storage and management of PSI.

Let’s not worry about duplication between recommendations 1 and 2 from the committee.  Let’s not worry about the "Information Management Framework" being desirable, and it’s contents as described.

What we should worry about is that most of the dot points in recommendation 2 shouldn’t need to be stated: these were supposed to be in place decades ago.  Indeed, you could argue that various statutes with "Archives", "RecordKeeping" and the like in their titles already demand that such a framework be in place, and that it is implemented consistently across the whole of government.

For example, we do have a whole-of-government methodology for categorization, storage and management of PSI.  Recordkeeping requirements federally and at state level are no different, so it’s worth looking at what National Archives Australia (naa.gov.au) has to say about what should be in an information management framework.

Among the things you must know about an information item are:

• What is the subject matter?  This relies on a classification system, and could be a very-fine-grained set of Dewey numbers, or could be a government thesaurus.
• Who is the author/custodian?  This could be an individual, a role, an agency, etc
• What is the audience/visibility?  This includes sensitivity (secret, commercial-in-confidence, etc – with "undefined" really implying that it should be freely available to all) and who reads the document (the general public, for example).
• Might the information require special handling (e.g. if it relates to evidence in criminal investigations).

The problem is, despite these requirements being around for decades (well before computers were invented), there is, in Victoria at least, no general understanding of the requirements or available toolsets, or worse, antipathy towards the satisfaction of those requirements.  Why else would the Victorian Auditor General have slammed recordkeeping awareness and practices throughout the Victorian government?  (See "Vic Gov Recordkeeping Slammed By Auditor" (2008-03-21).

As the auditor said:

There is a lack of understanding by senior management of what good records management looks like and, therefore, what should be done.

I’d say that too often, good records management is seen as an unnecessary expense by many operational areas, or good records management is seen as limiting the options of those decision makers who do not welcome close scrutiny.

The "unnecessary expense" excuse is a bit like someone saying "I don’t need to record petrol I put into my car, because that record does not help me keep my car going on a day-to-day basis".  True, but without those records, you risk poor management (more petrol is required as cars become inadequately maintained, you might be able to optimize routes, it’s hard to pin down rorting).

The key is classification.  It’s no use having millions of books, for example, if you cannot get to the ones you want, which is why when a book comes into a library, it is given a Dewey number, and entries made into indices by author, subject/keywords, and title.  Years ago, we did this will bits of cardboard, placed into various catalogs.  These days, with electronic databases, you only need to create a single record, as this single record can come up when querying from different perspectives.

The Australian Government Recordkeeping Metadata Standard (2008) describes these information items.  The full list is as follows:

1. Category
2. Identifier
3. Name
4. Date Range
5. Description
6. Related Entity
7. Change History
8. Jurisdiction
9. Security Classification
10. Security Caveat
11. Permissions
12. Rights
13. Contact
14. Position
15. Language
16. Coverage
17. Keyword
18. Disposal
19. Format
20. Extent
21. Medium
22. Integrity Check
23. Location
24. Document Form
25. Precedence

These categories and the allowed values in them are defined by various encoding schemes and lists, including (at federal level) the Australian Government Locator Service AGLS) and (at Victorian Level) the government thesaurus (see Jan 2008 v2.4 editions as HTML or PDF).

I happen to have worked with one of the smart cookies who designed at least some of these documents, and I have great respect for that person, and the work they produced.  Classifying a document using these schemes is pretty easy for anybody who can understand the contents of a document, and should be a no-brainer for the author(s) of a document.

So, why do so many government documents have such rubbish in them?  How can you verify my claim that the metadata of these documents is almost unmaintained?

Simply go and grab any Adobe Acrobat file (PDF extension) from government, use the File/Properties menu, and see if the title, author, subject and keywords make sense when compared to the document.  If these are not filled in, how can a catalog (of any description) help you find anything?

Let’s imagine something that we should be able to do.  Imagine you are running Centrelink in an area with a large proportion of residents not having English as their primary language.  You need to be able to get all of the documents for a particular language, with an audience of "citizen", from one or more agencies (including Centrelink, but also health agencies, agencies concerned with discrimination), relating to just a few topics, effective now or becoming effective in the next few months.

Getting the list of all of matching documents (and probably downloading them as a bundle, or ordering copies of all the pamphlets) should be trivial if your catalogs are anywhere near the required standard.

Again, I’ll stress that these sorts of things have been required since democratic government bureaucracies were invented.  As recordkeeping and document management are so poor (in Victoria at least), why and who have we allowed the system to deteriorate relative to the information loads and the capabilities of technology?

It seems to me that find the answers to "why" and "who" would be essential to encourage better compliance and adequate performance.

It is also worth asking if state governments should be the custodians of the classification systems.  Personally, I cannot see why each state should go to all the expense of developing such systems, when the same classification scheme can be equally applied across all Australian jurisdictions.  What could possibly be the differences between states (apart from the enumerated list of values, like names of geographical regions and department names) that would prevent such a consolidation?  More importantly, what intergovernmental inefficiencies, either for operation of existing agencies, or with restructuring of responsibilities between state and federal levels, would necessarily arise from disparate classification systems?

I’ll also remind readers (especially those in power), that the same level of records management is required for outsourced activities, where those activities relate to the work of government.  Too often, I suspect that government functions are outsourced at least with part of the motivation being that those records will be difficult to track down, and the agencies will hope to wash their hands of ensuring the proper handling of that information.

3. That the Victorian Government prospectively apply the Information Management Framework to its public sector information.

This seems to be a cop-out, admitting that there has been no real information management discipline applied across all agencies.  Being prospective, classifying documents as they are created and/or updated make some sense for efficiency, because it would be burdensome and not very effective to go through the blegabytes of information that is no longer applicable.  However, surely there should be something saying "and within a reasonable time frame, all active documents produced in the last n years will also be classified appropriately.

I have an ugly suspicion that when "prospective" is used, it will be seen as only applying to new documents, rather than to documents that are updated.  I hope I’m being far too cynical on this matter… but my experience tells me the cynicism is warranted.

See Also/Notes:

See the section of related articles in the main post listing the recommendations, but "Gov 2.0 and balneus nostalgia" (2009-06-24) has a pretty good list of earlier posts.

Annoyingly, I missed the inquiry into the use and availability of Public Sector Information (PSI) in Victoria, but this isn’t surprising given how difficult it is to find out what inquiries are happening.  (Regular readers will remember my many posts on the procedural problems with the "Melbourne’s Future Water Supply" inquiry).

Still, I did notice the final report come out, and I’ll be commenting on many of the individual dot points in the recommendations, and doing "compare and contrasts" of selected submissions over the next few weeks.

The list of recommendations is over the fold, and taken from the Victoria – 21st Century Approach to Government Information (2009-06-24) announcement published in the Victorian eGov Resource Centre newsletter.

My general feeling is that many of these recommendations have actually have regulations in place for decades and the tools to implement them, but that the Victorian Government thoroughly deserved the public flogging by the Auditor General a little time back about incompetent (or worse) management of information.

If we pare away the motherhood statements, then there appears to be some good stuff here.  Unfortunately, there has been some successful FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) by at least one of the companies making submissions, especially about definitions of terms like "open standards", and pushing the advantages short-term thinking.  (To start with, have a look at the Google and Microsoft submissions…. one muddies the waters and reeks of lawyers, while the other has a conversational tone, pretty clearly stating "this is our philosophical position, and here is a detailed list of various commercial interests we have in this process".  Guess which one is from which company?)

Look a little closer, and we see that there are quite a few escape clauses written into the recommendations… and you can bet there will be more by the time the executive is done with them!

Anyway, the list follows…. feel free to make comments here on particular points, and I’ll try to address your thoughts when it is time to write the post for that particular recommendation.

Inquiry into Improving Access to Victorian Public Sector Information and Data Recommendations

1. That the Victorian Government release a public statement indicating that it endorses open access as the default position for the management of its public sector information.
    
2. That the Victorian Government develop a whole-of-government Information Management Framework (IMF) with the following key features:
   • that the object of the IMF is to promote and facilitate increased access to and re-use of Victorian public sector information (PSI) by government, citizens, and businesses;
   • that the default position of the IMF be that all PSI is made available;
   • that the IMF define and describe criteria under which access to PSI may be restricted, or released under licence;
   • that PSI made available under the IMF be priced at no cost or marginal cost; and
   • that the IMF establish a systematic and consistent whole-of- government methodology for categorisation, storage and management of PSI.
      
3. That the Victorian Government prospectively apply the Information Management Framework to its public sector information.
    
4. That the Victorian Government adopt a narrow definition for the public sector for the purpose of establishing the government Information Management Framework. Initially this definition should comprise only Victorian Government departments.
    
5. That implementation of the Information Management Framework be conducted via a staged approach, with the executive branch of the Victorian Government leading development of the framework, and encouraging other agencies and entities to adopt similar frameworks, in the following order:
   • Victorian Government;
   • Parliament of Victoria, the judicial system and statutory authorities; and
   • other public sector agencies, including public hospitals and local councils.
      
6. That the Victorian Government, through individual departments, employ a systematic approach to identify materials for release and publish those materials on department websites.
    
7. That the Victorian Government seek legal advice to ensure it is fully covered for all areas of possible legal action that may arise from the release of public sector information.
    
8. That the Victorian Government encourage as part of its funding agreements with research agencies and higher education institutions that research results be deposited in open access journals or repositories. The Government should consider providing additional funds to these agencies to allow them to publish in open access journals that charge a fee for publication.
    
9. That the Victorian Government encourage divisions operating in the fields of biological innovation and research, including biotechnology development, to consider participating in the BiOS licensing system.
    
10. That the Victorian Government encourage departments to identify and publish materials under NEALS to allow these materials to be used freely for educational purposes by Australian schools.
     
11. That the Victorian Government develop a consistent copyright licensing system for use across all government departments.
     
12. That the Victorian Government establish a central office to develop a copyright licensing system, and provide advice to government on government copyright.
     
13. That exclusive arrangements not be entered into for licensing Victorian Government public sector information, excepting exclusive rights necessary toprotect the public interest.
     
14. That the Victorian Government adopt the Creative Commons licensing model as the default licensing system for the Information Management Framework.
     
15. That the Victorian Government adopt a hybrid public sector information licensing model comprising Creative Commons and a tailored suite of licences for restricted materials.
     
16. That the Victorian Government develop specific guidelines for the pricing of public sector information (PSI), emphasising the provision of PSI at no cost or marginal cost.
     
17. That all information and data determined to form part of the Victorian Government’s basic information product set, as defined by the Productivity Commission, be priced at no cost or marginal costs.
     
18. That the Victorian Government reconsider with a view to minimising, if not stopping, the practice of departments charging each other to access and re-use Government-owned information and data.
     
19. That the Victorian Government classify additional information products into three broad categories and price them as follows:
    • dissemination of existing products at no cost or marginal cost;
    • incremental products (which may involve additional data collection or compilation) at incremental (avoidable) cost; and
    • commercial (contestable) products according to competitive neutrality principles.
       
20. That the Victorian Government enhance its role as an information provider as a means to improve social benefits and facilitate commercial activity in the private sector.
     
21. That the Victorian Government require wherever possible that its information and data be stored in open standard formats.
     
22. That the Victorian Government develop a policy position and guidelines on the use of open standards for presentation, storage and delivery of public sector information by public sector agencies.
     
23. That the Victorian Government engage with the Australian National Data Service project regarding its potential application to public sector research.
     
24. That where appropriate, the Victorian Government release its public sector information in both primary and secondary formats.
     
25. That in future, and where possible, the Victorian Government develop and design databases in such a way as to facilitate the removal of identifying information if required.
     
26. That the Victorian Government develop and implement a custodianship policy as a mechanism to manage its information and data.
     
27. That the custodianship policy be based on the decentralised model where the management of information and data is retained in individual departments.
     
28. That the Victorian Government develop custodianship guidelines to assist departments implement and maintain the custodianship policy.
     
29. That the Victorian Government prospectively establish metadata records for most public sector information.
     
30. That all Victorian Government departments implement the Australian Government Locater Service metadata standard.
     
31. That the authoring of metadata be based on the decentralised model where data custodians retain responsibility for the establishment and ongoing management of metadata records.
     
32. That the Victorian Government establish a data management position within each of its departments, which holds responsibility for management and quality assurance of departments’ metadata records.
     
33. That the Victorian Government amend the AGLS Victoria: Metadata implementation manual to accommodate requirements of the Information Management Framework.
     
34. That the Victorian Government ensure that data custodians and data management officers are provided with adequate training to support the implementation of the Australian Government Locater Service metadata standard.
     
35. That the Victorian Government develop a whole-of-government public sector information (PSI) directory, and that metadata for all new PSI created within the Victorian Government be prospectively added to the directory.
     
36. That following development of the whole-of-government public sector information directory, and as resources allow, existing and historical documents and data held by the Victorian Government be added to the directory.
     
37. That the Victorian Government establish a public sector information steering committee for the purpose of overseeing, guiding and implementing the Victorian Government Information Management Framework.
     
38. That the steering committee be comprised of senior departmental staff; and that it be required to regularly report to the Minister responsible for the Information Management Framework on the framework’s implementation.
     
39. That the Victorian Government work with other jurisdictions towards national harmonisation in enhancing access to and re-use of PSI.
     
40. That following implementation of the Victorian Government Information Management Framework, the potential benefits to the public, commerce and Victorian public service efficiency be widely promoted.
     
41. That the Victorian Government, through the steering committee, establish a reporting mechanism for the Information Management Framework.
     
42. That the Victorian Government require, as part of its whole-of-government ICT Procurement Policy, that software procured by the Government be capable of saving files in open standard formats, and that wherever possible, the software be configured to save in open standard formats by default.
     
43. That the Victorian Government ensure when preparing guidance for procurement, ICT personnel should be equally aware of the strengths and weaknesses of both OSS and proprietary software.
     
44. That the Victorian Government fully evaluate the Victorian Department of Justice open source software (OSS) workstation trial to assess the potential for wider use of OSS in Victorian public service workstations.
     
45. That the Victorian Government examine its policy for ICT Procurement to ensure that it continues to assist the Victorian ICT industry.
     
46. That the Victorian Government ensure where appropriate that tenders are neither licence specific nor have proprietary software-specific requirements; and meet the given objectives of Government.

Come to think of it, there’s a whole book’s worth of deconstruction required!

I wonder how many spam-filters stopped the email I got a couple of days ago?

Inside the email was an offer of 3 million dollars (presumably US), and a "click here" link to make an application.

Was it for real – you betcha!

It was one of my newsletters from Nature:

Play your part – Help bring new multiple sclerosis treatments to market.
$3 million in funding available now for innovative research and commercial development proposals.
Who can apply?
- Academic investigators
- Seed and early stage companies.

I’m hoping that they get some good applications.  MS is a nasty condition, as well as being very interesting.

And the numbers they’ll be after first?  A doi list, not bank accounts.

Will our Oz councils, particularly the inner city ones, introduce a composting bin as well as the standard general garbage and recycling bin, and thus follow the lead of San Francisco? (Hat tip New York Times 2009-06-11)

Recidivist small residences and businesses get a $100 fine for putting the wrong thing in the wrong bin, and multi-residence buildings and larger businesses cop it sweeter at $1000.

I’ll admit, I wouldn’t have much of a problem.  At home during the week I’m extraordinarily lazy, because of all the good cheap eateries within 5 minutes walk, while over weekends on the coast, the magpies polish off the scraps.

It would be good if my local council (Stonnington) introduced this, if only up and down Glenferrie Road given all the eateries.  There’s a fair chance that with all the food bits from those eateries that the council would be able to save a fortune getting our parks in tip-top condition, and maybe even have a nice little earner on the side selling the stuff to gardening shops.  I only hope the worms have a high tolerance for caffeine from the mountains of coffee grounds!

Already my local shopping centre has separate bins in the food court for general garbage versus cartons and bottles (I don’t think they have much of a compliance problem – it’s a literate demographic here!), so I wonder it would be too difficult to add a third bin, and have a scraper so people can do the job properly.

… or are there some health regulations to prevent this?  If so, they would need to be changed, taking into account the service level agreements in those food courts for how often those bins are cleared out.

Regular readers will know of my interest in citizen engagement with policy development processes, information systems governance, and my respect for AGIMO and AGIMO’s political masters (including Gary Nairn from the Howard regime).

So, with Lindsay Tanner launching the Government 2.0 Taskforce, which is looking at ways of leveraging recently introduced "Web 2.0" tools (I hate that term, and prefer "The Semantic Web"), it’s worth raising again my submission to the AGIMO consultation about on-line consultations, and some previous posts on related issues.

I’ll admit that improving consultation processes is only part of the task, but it is an important part.

More important, I feel (and this is hinted at in my submission) is getting a grip on metadata management, which most bloggers/feedreaders refer to as "tagging".  The quality of the tags in government documents, whether for internal or external use, directly determines the efficiency (or not) of government operations, as well as determining whether citizens can find what consultations or announcements are on offer (or not).

More on this in future posts.

And before you look at the bits below, it’s worth reading Lindsay Tanner’s "Internet Drives Policy Rethink" (2008-11-24) post, because Tanner is one of the "good guys" pushing improvements in governance and Web 2.0.  It included this great paragraph (my bolding) which talks of the advantages of crowdsourcing, and by extension if nothing else, the advantages of high-quality open-source software:

Peer production frees labour from the need to work in the same place at the same time.  Groups can now work on a project across time zones and continents.  Significantly, peer production does not rely on hierarchy for organising labour….  The glue that binds peer production together is the ethic of collaboration it inculcates among groups.  People contribute their time to peer production because they find communities with a passion for making their adopted content niche the best it can be.  This environment also creates efficiencies by allowing skilled amateurs to allocate their intellectual capital to the content niche about which they are most passionate.  This is significant when you consider the quality and value of work done by people for love and not money.

Anyway, to the bits and pieces on government information handling and consultations:

• My submission to the AGIMO inquiry about consultations: PDF (via WordPress), or HTML (via Google Docs).
   
• Given that Gov 2.0 has a necessary-but-not-sufficient requirement of value-for-money IT services, it’s worth looking over the Gershon Report, using links from "Gershon Report to be implemented in full" (2008-11-28) and "Gershon Report into Oz Gov IT: Good but some holes" (2008-10-16)
   
• "The major inhibitor of open government and commercial efficiencies" discusses how poor management of email metadata (lack of use of "X-Headers" in email, mainly because most email clients provide less functionality than old ones) screws everybody over except the inefficient and the corrupt: and perhaps the Gov2.0 Taskforce would consider funding development X-Header-savvy plugins (that reference Dublin Core, AGLS and government thesauri) for common email clients (including Thunderbird and Firefox) given that the taskforce has that power (but I don’t know how full the chequebook is!)
   
• "2020 gabfest submission topic 9: Australian Governance" (2008-04-05)
   
• "Victorian gov recordkeeping slammed by auditor" (2008-03-21) highlights poor data management – so again, how can the data be leveraged for use in the Semantic Web?
   
• "Gormless Oz Political Bloggers" (2008-02-06) points out how few of the chattering netizen classes actually get involved
   
• "AGA proves government doesn’t know what it does" (2007-06-22) highlights how poorly politicians have been able to define what they are supposed to do (and so how the hell can they tag it up??).
   
• "Freedom from information – and fixing it" (2007-05-22) is a brief overview of how bad tagging (and security labelling) hides important information from the public, as well as the machinery of government.
   

The Productivity Commission has an inquiry open for public submissions until 2009-07-17 on the relative performance of public and commercialprivate hospitals.

• Issues paper: Here (includes submission notes)
   
• Study webpage: http://www.pc.gov.au/projects/study/hospitals/issues – although following the links from the main Productivity Commission leads you to the non-visible address http://cms.pc.gov.au/projects/study/hospitals/issues! – not very productive of the Productivity Commission!!!!
   
• Email: hospitals@pc.gov.au
   
• Freecall: 1800 020 083
   
• Media Release by Chris Bowen including terms of reference
   

The terms of reference include:

… relative performance of the public and private hospital systems, and related data issues. As part of its study, the Commission should consider:

1. comparative hospital and medical costs for clinically similar procedures performed by public and private hospitals, using baseline data to be provided by states and territories under the new National Healthcare Agreement, and existing data provided to the Government by private hospitals. The analysis is to take into account the costs of capital, FBT exemptions and other relevant factors.
    
2. the rate of hospital-acquired infections, by type, reported by public and private hospitals, using baseline data to be provided by states and territories under the new National Healthcare Agreement, and existing data provided to the Government by private hospitals.
    
3. rates of fully informed financial consent for privately insured patients treated as private patients in both public and private hospitals, categorised by type of provider (that is, public hospital, private hospital, medical practitioner [by Speciality]), and by Statistical Local Area (SLA) or equivalent, including:
   • the average cost of out of pocket expenses for patients who do not receive enough financial information from the provider to give fully informed financial consent, the range of these costs and the maximum out of pocket cost incurred by in-hospital patients categorised by type of provider (as detailed above).
   • best practice examples where fully informed financial consent is provided for every procedure, (with a specific emphasis on any best practice examples occurring in specialties where lack of fully informed financial consent is most common).
   • other relevant performance indicators, including the ability of such indicators to inform comparisons of hospital performance and efficiency.
4. If any of the foregoing tasks prove not fully possible because of conceptual problems and data limitations, the Commission should propose any developments that would improve the feasibility of future comparisons.

The Commission will also provide advice to the Government on the most appropriate indexation factor for the Medicare Levy Surcharge thresholds.

I’m wondering why there was no consideration of the "efficiencies" private hospitals have by having the option to transfer patients to public hospitals when the going gets tough, so they can spend less on the big-ticket capital investment items.

For example, how many private hospitals have serious spinal injury and rehabilitation units?

And why must the cover sheet be provided in a proprietary (Microsoft) format when it would be just as easy to provide one in good old HTML.  I wouldn’t be the least bit sad if the commission got those back infected with some evil macro virus that Microsoft Office products are prone to!

From Ars Technica ("City to job applicants: Facebook, Myspace logins please" 2009-06-18) comes something deeply disturbing.

The city of Bozeman Montana, however, has decided that all of that is too much work—it’s now requesting that potential employees hand over the login credentials for any social networking sites they frequent.

It seems to me that this idea is just plain wrong on so many levels, not just an invasion of privacy of the individual with no equivalent disclosure by the city of Bozeman Montana (of all banking records, for example, or better still, give the applicant the city’s digital key to peruse and publish all contract details), but also an invasion of privacy of all third parties that have granted privileges to particular individuals.

It also opens up a huge opportunity for abuse by individuals, not limited merely to someone working for Bozeman given the credentials of their ex-spouse!  With the way government agencies squirrel away data, it would take about 10 seconds to blacklist someone forever with a simple status update on a social website ("Activities: burning cute kittens alive, eating babies, implementing my evil plan to destroy the world; Religious Views: Satanist; …. " – you get the idea).  From the details available to the "investigator", it would be trivial to answer questions over the phone from many utilities – and get power and/or phone disconnected.

Just imagine you had the social website login of someone you disliked (whether because you knew them, or just plain didn’t like an "ethnic" name) – how would you go about destroying the reputation of that person?  Yes, fun to contemplate, until you realize it can be done to you!

So, after reading this, who is thinking about creating a faux gmail and facebook/myspace account, with only "nice" friends, discussing only how wonderful potential employers are?

Meanwhile, I cannot wait for such abuse to be uncovered (it’s doubtless already happened), preferably with a very large damages bill.

I’ll be posting on other aspects of the Government 2.0 website launched by Tanner and Ludwig another day, but something in the banner design competition notice caught my eye:

The logo should be provided in a scalable (preferably vector based) or high quality version so it can be incorporated in any potential printed documents. Please use a popular graphics format such as jpeg, png, gif, or psd.

Ummmmmm.  I’m having a problem getting this into my brain – the enumerated list not matching the class label…

Vector graphics?  JPEG, GIF and PNG are bitmapped a.k.a. raster a.k.a. pixellized.

PSD?  Yes, it is a vector-based format, but I cannot think of tools that can generate PSD files in full vector glory apart from Adobe Photoshop…. few programs can even display PSD files.

If they want something that is scalable, vector-based, and graphic, then SVG (Scalable Vector Graphic) format is the only sensible choice, with the added advantage that SVG is a web standard, defined by the World Wide Web Consortium – the same folk that determine all web standards.  See the SVG page at the W3.

And, while thinking about websites for "Government 2.0", you’d hope that the site would send out HTML that actually parsed, allowing it to meet pretty much the simplest technical requirement the W3 defines.  Nope!, unlike the finance.gov.au site which DOES parse correctly.

• Check ANY web page (that doesn’t need a cookie to log in) using validator.w3.org.  All it does is check if the HTML is well-formed.
   
• The errors on gov2.net.au were both as follows (on line 208 column 16, and line 210 column 16):
  

  end tag for "ul" which is not finished.
  Most likely, you nested tags and closed them in the wrong order. For example <p><em>…</p> is not acceptable, as <em> must be closed before <p>. Acceptable nesting is: <p><em>…</em></p>
  Another possibility is that you used an element which requires a child element that you did not include. Hence the parent element is "not finished", not complete.  For instance, in HTML the <head> element must contain a <title> child element, lists (ul, ol, dl) require list items (li, or dt, dd), and so on.

• At least gov2.net.au (with two errors on the homepage) is better than the outsourced site running the human rights government consultation… 200 errors and counting….
• My main beef is that my google searches across Australian governments won’t work any more, because it is outside the gov.au domain.

There are only a couple of groups who could have received benefit from the fake Ute-gate email:

• The federal government;
• The news media or a particular journalist;
• anti-Turnbull forces in the federal opposition;

It would be a high-risk tactic for the government to create and disseminate the bogus email.

It would be even more risky for a journalist to create the fake email.

If however, it was somebody associated with the current federal opposition, it cannot be someone wanting Turnbull to look good, which leaves only anti-Turnbull forces.

… and if the Rudd government is totally clean on this issue, they’ll be pushing the AFP for a conclusive investigation.

So… any guesses as to the culprit?  A vengeful Brendan Nelson doesn’t seem likely – even his feeble brain will have worked out he has no chance of leading the party let alone the country.  Costello’s resignation timing suggests that Captain Smirk has clean hands, or if the resignation is withdrawn, that he could be a master of tossing the red-herring.

…Perhaps, and it’s mine – indeed this very post.

This comment by Greego (a regular at the Australian Libertarian Society blog) to my post "Worst Oz libertarian blog idea ever" (2009-06-17), itself in response to this ALS blog post got me thinking…

If a central plank generally attributed to states (law enforcement) can be essentially a competitive industry (with presumably different prices offered by different suppliers for different services), then why not open the rest to competition?

(It might be difficult to get parties in a dispute agreeing on the judge, however!  And who says politicians can’t be bought?)

Why not even let people choose the nation-state they want citizenship in?  Change their brand loyalties without friction as service offeerings change? After all, in a globalized market, with states seen as service providers, why shouldn’t this service be subject to competition and GATT?  The geographic restraint of trade is ridiculous and totally against free-market principles.

Meanwhile, think of the advantages.  States can get taxes from people according to their service offerings.  The more efficient the state, the more citizens (sorry, customers) they will attract.

On top of this, warfare between states (sorry, service providers) that destroys infrastructure is almost inconceivable.  There’s an efficiency gain straight away!

Besides, I can’t wait to watch what happens in those states that ultra-capitalists join: no rules… no taxes… no state.

Further, why should there be any barriers to new entries into the market?

Oh dear, does this libertarian train of thought lead to virtual distributed communes?

The only real problem with this system is the difficulty of finding place to train your national sports teams.  Bummer – there’s the showstopper.

Despite that, I hereby create Balneusia – with me as President until I gather enough citizens to form a governing council.  Any funds sent to the Balneusian Treasury from citizens are simply movements within the Balneusian state, so are not subject to controls and taxes of other states.

I’ll be issuing a detailed prospectus for those interested in becoming citizens shortly, but here are a few of the initial bits of legislation I’ll be passing:

• No Collingwood Football Club supporters are accepted as citizens, and change of allegiance to that club with be deemed treason, with the criminal condemned to watch replays of every match Collingwood ever lost, and given that treason precludes the right to any electoral activity, you cannot change states again.  (There, that’ll get Balneusia a pretty big citizenship base, especially in South-Western Victoria).
   
• While money transfers from other states into Balneusia are permitted, only the state can use those funds, and only for purchase of essential goods from other states.
   
• The only medium of exchange between citizens is work – hours are banked in the Balneusian National Repository according to ability, and distributed according to need.
   
• All citizens (subject to cognitive tests) will be required to vote on every piece of legislation, with regulation development modelled on the procedures used by the Internet Engineering Task Force and the World Wide Web Consortium for standards development and ratification.  (The penalty for not voting on a piece of legislation is to be forced to watch a replay of every Collingwood grand final victory – or listen to a playlist of songs alternating between Celine Dion and whatever death metal band I get told the name of first if the criminal is not into Aussie Rules Football.)
   
• All real estate purchased or leased from other states is common property, and will be considered a consulate.
   
• Citizenship is automatically granted to all anthropoid apes and cetaceans, who will have full protection under international law (yep, Balneusia expects a seat at the UN).
   
• Dual citizenship is illegal.

Notes/See Also

• I’m with Legal Eagle and her comment on my original post about competitive service providers of policing services.
   
• Eeek!  According to More’s Utopia, which I like, those who seek office should be precluded from it for life.  I guess the compromise is that I’ll have to step down and merely be another ordinary governing council member – like every other citizen – as soon as somebody else becomes a Balneusian.  Oh well – whoever said something as complex as the rules for a state could avoid Kurt Gödel’s work that forces incompleteness or inconsistency!
   
• Yep, I’m merely performing an acquisition of micturition products in case you hadn’t figured it out yet, (or as the latest incarnation of that foreigner, Australian PM Kevin Rudd would say, "Getting the piss").

This from the Australian Libertarian Society blog made my jaw drop.

Worried about bad cops, John Humphreys suggests that councils purchase police services from a range of police providers.

The best solution to this that I can see (besides strong checks and balances) is to introduce greater competition in the "security market".  This would provide an incentive to provide a better service, for a lower cost, and allow greater diversity.  The easiest way to introduce competition in the Australian system is to allow each local council to choose thier police provider.

This is like saying "the best solution to getting oxygen into the body (apart from breathing) is to pump oxygen in through a urethral catheter".

Ye gods!  Having each instance of the most incompetent and corrupt tier of government hiring from service providers (and the corrupt cops are well-versed in standover tactics) is… words fail me!

Even ALS blog denizens started choking and emitting phrases like "anarcho-capitalist" in response to the post.

What next, councils and states able to choose their own military services suppliers?

Perhaps the only thing Humphreys might stop at is letting each council have it’s own rules for contract law.

If anyone knows a worse idea from the ALS blog (which, as I said, can have the odd sensible point), then let us know.

The ALP is probably truly sad that Captain Smirk is quitting politics.

For one, the ALP has enjoyed the instability in Liberal Party ranks caused merely by the Smirk’s presence, even if the Smirk wasn’t trying, merely staying in parliament until just after the magical 18 years ticked over and his parliamentary superannuation returns were optimized (hat tip to Peter Martin).

If Peter Martin’s observations aren’t coincidental, nothing better pinpoints the motives of his political career than his leaving of it.

With that useful-to-the-ALP member for Higgins departing, the newcomer will be someone all fired up to make a name for themselves and look attractive to Liberal Party donors – something that might furrow ALP brows.

One of the front-runners is John Roskam, best known for his work as Fan-in-Chief of the Gordon Gecko Appreciation Society.  Roskam has already been the star of previous Balneus posts here (unsurprisingly, a negative review) and here (a "Shock! Horror! Roskam has a point!" post).

As mentioned in the thread to this post by Lyn over at Public Opinion (which prompted this post), it is posible that Roskam might, liberated from the short leash of the need to satisfy IPA funders (replaced by the slightly longer leash of the need to satisfy Liberal Party donors), get in touch with an inner Petro and use his intellect for something useful.  But I won’t hold my breath.

I’m also hoping that Captain Smirk gets a nice cushy job up in Sydney, or preferably overseas, because then I won’t have to worry about the possibility of bumping into him on Glenferrie Road, enjoying his leisure, smirking about his smart choice of exit timing, or even worse, coming into my local caffeine supplier and sitting down next to me.

And if I must have a free-market think-tanker as my local member, it’s a pity Andrew Norton probably won’t come over the river from Carlton.

See Also

• Gotta love Lindsay Tanner’s facebook message on the subject:
  

  Lindsay Tanner farewelled retiring Peter Costello in Parliament yesterday when he said: "It is always a sad day when Parliament loses a dedicated Essendon supporter … and I wish him well."

The myki transport ticketing system pushed (way over time, way over budget, and way under-scrutinized) by Joh Brumby for Melbourne has been running in Geelong and the Bellarine Peninsula.

It might work there, and the testing has had a really low bar, but it certainly won’t work in the high-load areas of Melbourne.

So, as someone who relies on public transport, living in Melbourne, but spending most weekends on the Bellarine, here are a few observations:

It can take forever to validate a Myki ticket.  The first hint about this is the time taken between the bus driver punching in what ticket you want, putting the ticket on the scanner, and waiting for it to issue a really annoying “ta-da” fanfare that sounds like a third-rate ringtone played through a guitar distortion pedal and a big fat Marshall amp.  Let’s hope that Melbournians aren’t subjected to the “ta-da”.

But worse is the time it takes to re-validate the ticket when getting back on the bus.  You have to place the ticket flat on a vertical surface and hold it for a while – something that could be difficult for someone with shaky hands and unsteady feet.  The problem is that the validation is useless.  The reader can keep complaining about an invalid ticket unless it is oriented pretty accurately when you first go near the reader, even if you replace it, because, as the bus driver said, you have to move it well away from the reader once it has registered a problem.

I had to move the ticket about an arm’s length away from the reader and bring it back again for the reader to finally figure it out.

Can’t see you being able to do that on a peak-hour tram!

So, when the reader is misbehaving, it can take 30 seconds to finally get it to accept your ticket.  That would be bad enough getting into a tram or train, but is made at least twice as bad given that you have to get it validated on the way out.

Can you imagine what it will be like at the corner of Flinders and Swanston in peak hour?  Can you imagine what just the extra time taken for people to get off trams will do to the time it takes for a tram to go the whole route?

Of course, it’s not going to be easy to hold your ticket the right way either, because you can bet that you’ll be jostled by people moving in and out of the tram at the same time, and my experience with having to move the ticket well away from the reader to get rid of its confusion means that the system will never be able to do as originally touted – being able to read the ticket while it was still in the pocket.

On top of all this, the system is supposed to figure out the best transport price for you.  I’m very skeptical it will do that correctly, unless there is no charge made or calculated for some time.  This is especially true for the longer periodical tickets.

The only way the government can guarantee the charge calculations giving the best value to the user is if there is very little differentiation in price between getting 7 dailies versus a weekly.

The only thing anywhere near as bad for Melbournians as the introduction of myki is if the deplorable Connex, who cannot run trains if the weather is either warm or wet, take over the trams too, which looks like a distinct possibility.

It’s pretty rough when a died-in-the-wool lefty will look at the Brumby government and look back at the horrible Kennett transport "innovations" with fond nostalgia!

"baraholka1" asks in a comment on my post about Senator Fielding’s idiocy or hypocrisy (probably both):

Please provide one scripture from the Bible which says "Refusing to look for evidence is a virtue"

That’s pretty simple: we need only recall the common English phrase "Doubting Thomas":

Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

– John 20:29

The Gospel of John isn’t exactly non-core Christian scripture, however much the better classes of Xtian admit the inappropriateness of many parts of the Old Testament and the non-Gospel New Testament.

It would be an odd or malignant deity (the likes of Ares springs to mind) that bestows blessings for failings.  A just deity bestows blessings for virtues, or at the very least, refusal to be evil.

But then, the imaginary friend of the Abrahamists was originally the Mesopotamian storm god, and even in the Abrahamist tradition, was heavily into smiting directly or indirectly, often with smiting of innocents (see the genocide verses of Joshua).  It wasn’t merely an Old Testament thing, replaced by a touchy-feely Jeshua bar-Joseph, as the hero of the New Testament even smote a fig tree for obeying the laws of nature (bearing no fruit out-of-season).

Strangely, Judaists and Xtians claim the Koran argues for violence, even though the two epithets constantly associated with the Islamic god are "compassionate and merciful" – good honest virtues if there ever were any.

"Baraholka1" could be a skeptic seeking details to use when educating others of the inappropriateness of allowing people of faith to have influence over public policy, or , perhaps more likely, an Abrahamist with a typically poor knowledge of scripture and an inability or unwillingness to join the dots.

The far harder question is the obverse of that asked by "Baraholka1": "Please provide one scripture from the Bible where a thirst for evidence and logic is considered a virtue or worthy of receiving blessings?"

Note too that the Abrahamist deity would have preferred humanity to remain ignorant, even of the difference between good and evil.  It is Lucifer (literally, "the bringer of light"), despised by the faithful, who provided humans with the capability to rise about brutish self-interest using an apple from the Tree of Knowledge.  Indeed, throughout many religions there is the common theme of a deity (e.g. Loki and Prometheus) teaching humanity about the use of fire (the most fundamental technology we have), and as a result of this great benevolence, being condemned to perpetual torment by the other deities in the pantheon.

It wouldn’t be surprising if there was a key verse expurgated from the Sermon on the Mount:

Blessed are the wilfully ignorant and feeble-minded, for they are exactly where heaven wants them.

See Also/Notes:

• It didn’t take long with Google to find another bit of the New Testament that expresses a clear preference for those who exhibit blind faith rather than look for supporting evidence:
  

  Whom having not seen, ye love; in whom, though now ye see him not, yet believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory: // Receiving the end of your faith, even the salvation of your souls.

  – 1 Peter 1:8-9

• A good way of finding parts of scripture that describe blind faith as a virtue is to find yourself a concordance and look up "faith".
   
• Of course there are many folk who self-identify as faithful Abrahamists who have risen above scripture, attempting to reconcile their human reason and their education with faith, asking not whether something is good or bad because it complies (or not) with scriptural prescriptions and proscriptions, but instead, using common sense and human value systems to ask whether a bit of scripture should be considered authentic or not.  While such attitudes are infinitely preferable and admirable compared to blind acceptance of the selection of "convenient" canonical texts (to please the odious Constantine), it seems akin to all the complicated epicycles overlaid on the Ptolemaic geocentric system to account for observation rather than take the simpler approach of accepting the heliocentric solar system.
   
• Copernicus understood the nature of religious establishments, and pragmatically published posthumously.  Galileo didn’t understand this until offered hell-on-earth, recanted, with (probably apocryphally) only the quiet protest "E pur si muove!".
   
• Mr. Deity and the Evil – and check out the rest of the Mr. Deity clips (Think of it as a cross between a crash course in Abrahamism and "The Office"

Senator Fielding, on ABC’s "The Insiders" (2009-06-14) displayed his selective requirements for evidence, and flawed logic today that makes me wonder how he passed calculus 101 on his way to he engineering degree, a qualification he prates about when saying he wants evidence about anthrogenicity of climate change.

Let’s imagine the following scenario, using basic physics and Fielding’s logic:

Imagine you are in a car, and see it heading for a cliff.  You apply the brakes, and Fielding, in the passenger seat, says "We are still moving closer to the cliff even though you are applying the brakes.  Therefore applying the brakes is pointless.  Why not try the accelerator?"

He states he is worried about the economic impact of climate change action, so let’s do an equivalent bit of Fielding logic in basic finance:

"I’ve paid $10 on my mortgage this month, and the amount owed went up!"

This is his similar to logic transposed from global temperature and carbon emissions: where his line broadcast by "The Insiders" is "I was presented some information that showed that over the last decade or so carbon emissions have been going up, but global temperature hasn’t".

And this is without dealing with complex systems, or influences locked in even without changing anything else.

Fielding also said:

What I do Barrie is look at actually information and facts and figures and being an engineer, that’s what I’m trained to do is look at facts and figures.

Steve: No, you are supposed to think about them, and then understand safety factors, spending more money that your calculations suggest you need to, erring on the side of safety.

Fielding (and Rudd) are committed Xtians, a religion that says "Refusing to look for evidence is a virtue".

Take a jump out of a plane (I’ll allow you a parachute), see how you feel after falling 500m, and if you are still fine, take the parachute off, because all it is doing is putting creases in your clothes and ruining your aerodynamics.

Do it sooner rather than later.  Pray to your imaginary friend after jumping out of the plane if you like.  Maybe we’ll get another senator to fill your vacant seat that understands basic physics, basic maths, and has a hope of grasping the issues of complex systems – biological, sociological, geological, and economic, rather than an MBA who has worked in advertising (Yellow Pages) and for Big Carbon (United Energy).

From your "About Page" at stevefielding.com.au:

After finishing high school, Steve did a Bachelor of Engineering degree at RMIT University which he completed in 1983. He then started work at Hewlett Packard where he met Susan, who also worked there.

Steve later moved into management and executive roles with NEC and Siemens, and completed a Masters of Business Administration (MBA) at Monash University in 1992.

Later that year Steve and his family moved to Wellington in New Zealand where he took up an executive role with Telecom NZ. They returned to Australia in 1995. Steve worked with United Energy and then Yellow Pages. For the last five years, he has been with one of Victoria’s largest superannuation funds, Vision Super (formerly Local Authority Super).

A passion for local issues saw Steve elected as a councillor to Knox City Council in 2003 and 2004. Steve stood as a Victorian Senate candidate for the FAMILY FIRST Party in the 2004 election and took up his position in the Senate on July 1, 2005. Steve thinks not enough time is spent discussing how economic pressures are affecting families.

For the last "five years, he has been with one of Victoria’s largest superannuation funds"?  I thought you were supposed to be a Senator?  I guess your understanding of semantics demonstrated on a page you obviously care a lot about is no better than your maths and science.  But then, internal consistency has never been your strong suit.

…And MBA’s like you have done a bang-up job understanding how to run an economy without crashing – haven’t they?

C.P. Snow would giggle and be pleased.  OK, he might groan as well.

Subtitled "Continuous Melatonin Treatment Maintains Youthful Rhythmic Activity in Aging Crocidura russula" is a paper on how melatonin (which among other things, is very involved in body clocks) affects a small mammal that looks a bit like a mouse.

The title (and link) over the fold (so you can think about it for a minute and take a guess).

THE TIMING OF THE SHREW (doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005904).

It’s a little too striking to merely share in Ecletica, so worth mentioning here.

"Spoof paper accepted by ‘peer-reviewed’ journal" (2009-06-11, New Scientist) gives some details about Philip Davis (assisted by a member of the New Eng J Med publishing team), who had a computer-generated "research" paper accepted for publication (providing $800 was deposited in a middle-eastern tax haven by the author).

It’s also worth looking at the software used to generate the bogus paper.  Simply go to the main page of SCIgen at MIT, enter between one and five author names, push a button, and voila!  (Source code available, along with lots of other samples – including acceptances!)

I’m unsure whether Bentham Science Publishers should be labelled mere scammers or scientific fraud.  (I regard scientific fraud as an evil attack on the foundations of rational society, but then I got caught in the backwash of the scandal about my then-dean Michael Briggs, and my favorite lecturer who did a lot of the legwork exposing him suffered tremendously.  If there’s a heaven, Jill Blunk is there with a bench of the spiffiest research kit, a top-of-the-range stereo belting out opera, with an exercise bike to use when she reads journals.)

Not mentioned in the New Scientist article is the page of apparent endorsements by Nobel laureates.  Was this a reputable publishing house that got taken over by unscrupulous so-and-sos?  …Or are the endorsements as bogus as the peer review?

Anyway, dive around the SCIgen site for giggles, "write" a computer science research paper to impress your friends, and also visit the Scholarly Kitchen post "Open Access Publisher Accepts Nonsense Manuscript for Dollars" (2009-06-10) from the "author" of the bogus paper.

As if any reputable and ethical publisher wouldn’t at least question the legitimacy of a computer science paper with authors apparently affiliated with the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology!

Even a QuadRant editor wouldn’t fall for that one!

See Also

• There is a great "Ernie’s 3DPancakes" post here about a 2005 conference that was sokalized.  Read it.
• The odd thing about Briggs is that his papers on side effects of the contraceptive pill were good guesses.  The only thing in his favor is that no rabbits were harmed in his research.

Error bars are never valued by those who would benefit from them the most.

A while back I (2008-12-21) mentioned an article from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge that showed people looked more favorably on artful dodgers who avoided questions, than a stumbling truth teller.  Depressing.

There’s another paper to file under "we’re all doomed": "Humans prefer cockiness to expertise" (New Scientist 2009-06-10) – even if the cocksure no-nothing has a proven bad record.

So, the best chance a political party has of winning a seat is to get the most arrogant dissembler they can find, preferably one ignorant of their own ignorance.  Religious zealots will beat subtle theologians for market share.

And so much for the persuasiveness of nuanced opinions and list of caveats.  No-one wants to listen.

Geoscientists, carefully laying out their thoughts on climate change, haven’t a hope in hell of getting past the electorate and the politicians.

Metaphysical arguments and the admission of doubt will find it hard to compete against the simplistic unreasons given by ardent theists – and the more idiotic the theist, the more unaware of their own ignorance, the more convincing they will be!

It’s a bit like my rule about people grading themselves between 1 and 5 out of 5 in various domains.  Ninety-nine percent of people rate themselves as "3", because those who should be a "1" don’t know the extent of their ignorance, while those who should be a “5″ have an excellent grasp of the gaps in their knowledge.  Ask me what I don’t know about unix (I used to teach it) and I’ll take a good hour to list things.  Ask ken (met him once at an AUUG conference) what he doesn’t know about unix and he’d probably take a week to give you just the bullet points.

From the New Scientist article:

The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record.  Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are.  And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge.

The study used a game, players guessing the weight of people in photographs, and able to "buy" advice (a bit like being offered lifelines in quiz shows).

In the later rounds, guessers tended to avoid advisers who had been wrong previously, but this effect was more than outweighed by the bias towards confidence.

This should have been no surprise.  The baseless "It’ll take two weeks and cost 50K" is preferred by managers rather than "It’ll probably take a couple of weeks, cost between 40K and 60K, but if x, y, or z pops up, that could stretch time-to-delivery to about a month, while if q,r and s don’t surface, it might only take a week".

So I can now state categorically that all J’s on the Myers-Briggs should be taken out and shot, so we P’s have a chance of running things properly.

OK, so maybe we don’t kill those with borderline J-ness, perhaps only those in the top 3 or 4 deciles of J-ness, …. and maybe not if there is a hope of upping their P-ness in the next 5 through 20 years… but maybe we keep just a few J’s alive, even though I can’t think right now why we’d need them, there might be some value in having a few breeding specimens…

Curses!  Foiled again!  Hoist with my own P-type!

See Also

• Yep. I’m an off-the-scale NTP, with a little i at the front, which is why I prefer personality typing tools (I once wrote psychometric software used by clinicians, so I’m an informed user of such tools) that allow graduated rather than yes/no responses. Grab a copy (Microsoft EXE file included, but unix source available) of the DDLI which is pretty darn good – and even has an "If I’m wrong, there is a chance you are an XXXX because…" section, or at least try this – less subtle than the DDLI, but very much better than most Yes/No MBTI tools.

Minister for Health and Ageing, Nicola Roxon, is not known for being a head-kicker (witness her gentle putdown of the Mad Monk for not turning up on time for a National Press Gallery speech).  She put her head-kicking boots on again today, with good justification, and some style (see below the fold).

Coalition senators treated their duties, the Australian people, and perhaps even the principles of democracy, with contempt, refusing to turn up (or even give notice of intended absences) to the public hearings, part of a Senate Inquiry into means-testing private insurance rebates.

(The post I refer to has some pretty damning figures about the whole idea of subsidizing inefficient middle-persons, so I’m in favor of the bill as far as it goes, but wish it completely abolished the rebate.)

From Roxon’s 2009-06-09 Media Release – and unusually I’ll quote all but the final two paragraphs from a ministerial media spin release:

Coalition Senators Fail To Turn Up For Work
The Coalition’s disinterest in making Australia’s health system fairer and more sustainable was confirmed today by their failure to turn up at a Senate Inquiry into the Government’s proposed means testing of the Private Health Insurance rebate.

Most of the scheduled public hearing had to be cancelled because the Coalition Senators failed to attend." None of the Coalition members of the Committee contacted the Secretariat or Committee Chair to advise they would not be attending.

The Coalition’s claims to be concerned about the proposed changes cannot be taken seriously when they cannot be bothered to turn up to a public hearing.

Since May 12, the Opposition has displayed its contempt for Australia’s health system by not bothering to ask the Government even one question about health in Question Time.

It is irresponsible (apart from illness or urgent family requirements) for opposition senators to abrogate their duties in the only forum where they can make a difference – senate committees.

It’s far-fetched to think that this mass absenteeism, and plain rudeness, was not orchestrated.  And this from a party that abhors workplace strikes and vilifies those who organize the strikes even if they are totally justifiable!

Either Turnbull cannot control the organized shenanigans of unworthy parliamentarians in his party, or he was involved in organizing this co-ordinated abrogation of responsibilities.

I actually don’t mind Turnbull (unusual, because the last Liberal leader I liked was Gorton), and I don’t think he’d orchestrate such a stunt.

This suggests that other forces in the party caused the trouble.

I hope Turnbull gets some control over the unreasonable elements in his party room, or at least condemns such behaviour – perhaps suggesting that those Senator’s salaries should be cut pro-rata based on the number of days they sit in parliament or in committee.

As to Nicola Roxon… we’ll she isn’t a Julia Gillard, who’d have probably gone all Keatingesque with "Bludgers spitting on Australian democracy, cosying up with the parasites sucking the lifeblood from our health system, like workers claiming a sickie when actually out whoring and partying with other anti-social scum.".

New Scientist presents even more evidence why we should develop a "cat calicivirus", wiping out all cats in Australia except those with owners prepared to cough up money for a vaccine – and preferably put money into a fund to compensate the nation for the 1500 Australians killed by cats every year (and that’s not including suicides by those with schizophrenia or a bipolar disorder).

New Scientist cites estimates of Toxoplasmosis-related road deaths worldwide between 400 thousand and a million each year (and then we should add in the costs of injuries and rehabilitation).  Toxoplasmosis would not spread if there were no cats.

As we cannot vaccinate every cat against the Toxoplasmosis parasite, the only alternative is to create a virus that kills all cats except those vaccinated against the cat-killing virus.

Those who were Rh-negative and had toxo were 2.5 times as likely to have an accident as uninfected drivers who were Rh-negative, or any Rh-positive drivers

Flegr says these results suggest that between 400,000 and a million of the world’s annual road deaths might be due to toxo infection. He suggests regularly testing Rh-negative pilots, air traffic controllers and truck drivers for the infection.

I don’t think dogs would attack, let alone be contributory causes to the death of anywhere near that many people each year.

This relates to accumulating evidence that the archetypal "mad old cat lady" liked cats and then became mad.

More quantitatively, early exposure of children to cats dramatically increases the risk of the child being diagnosed with schizophrenia.

So, to reduce the costs associated with road trauma, the Transport Accident Commission and similar agencies in other states should engage in a massive cat eradication program, lowering (if Flegr’s estimates are right) the average death tolls in Australian states by a couple of hundred.

It’s obviously more ethical (and certainly cheaper during regulatory approvals) to design a bug and vaccine specific to cats rather than immunize all humans.

…and Australia is the perfect place to release it, because there are no native cats, and the beneficial effects on native wildlife would be huge.

But killing one cat isn’t enough to stop what must be a significant portion of government spending in countries with many cat lovers… you have to ensure that people don’t come into contact with cats that have been infected with T. gondii – and that’s nearly all of them.  (Add up the costs of road accidents, the cost of treating 50% of schizophrenics and the significant costs associated with social services and lost productivity for schizophrenia and bipolar disorders… if it comes much under 1% of government spending I’d be surprised.)

Maybe when motor vehicle insurers demand an extra charge for cat lovers, especially Rh-negative ones, in the same way that life insurance costs more for smokers, then something might change and many preventable deaths, on roads, and through suicide, wouldn’t happen any more, and our hard-pressed native wildlife will be happier.

And I wouldn’t mind if, because of a highly desirable eradication of felids in Australia, the only cats I like had to change their name back to "The Seagulls"

See Also/Notes:

• "Increased incidence of traffic accidents in Toxoplasma-infected military drivers and protective effect RhD molecule revealed by a large-scale prospective cohort study" (2009-05-26) BMC Infectious Diseases 2009, 9:72doi:10.1186/1471-2334-9-72 also suggests RhD polymorphism may arise because of the need to protect ourselves from cats (Rh+) versus the benefits of Rh- that must explain the continued existence in the population despite the plague of cats.
  

  Our results show that RhD-negative subjects with high titers of anti-Toxoplasma antibodies had a probability of a traffic accident of about 16.7%, i.e. a more than six times higher rate than Toxoplasma-free or RhD-positive subjects.

  …and yes, I note the difference in these figures from that in the New Scientist article.
   

• "Parasite may increase your odds of an auto accident" (2009-06-09) New Scientist  – up to 2.5 times more likely if you are Rh-negative
• "A Unique Dual Activity Amino Acid Hydroxylase in Toxoplasma gondii" PLoS One
   
• "Toxoplasmosis parasite may trigger schizophrenia and bipolar disorders" (2009-03-11) Science Daily
   
• From the US CDC (Centre for Disease Control):
  • "Toxoplasmosis/Pregnant women"
    

    Most infected infants do not have symptoms at birth but can develop serious symptoms later in life, such as blindness or mental disability. Occasionally infected newborns have serious eye or brain damage at birth.

     

  • "Toxoplasma gondii and schizophrenia" (2003-11)
    

    Since 1953, a total of 19 studies of T. gondii antibodies in persons with schizophrenia and other severe psychiatric disorders and in controls have been reported; 18 reported a higher percentage of antibodies in the affected persons; in 11 studies the difference was statistically significant. Two other studies found that exposure to cats in childhood was a risk factor for the development of schizophrenia.

• "Maternal Exposure to Toxoplasmosis and Risk of Schizophrenia in Adult Offspring" Am J Psychiatry 162:767-773, April 2005
  

  CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that maternal exposure to toxoplasmosis may be a risk factor for schizophrenia. The findings may be explained by reactivated infection or an effect of the antibody on the developing fetus. Given that toxoplasmosis is a preventable infection, the findings, if replicated, may have implications for reducing the incidence of schizophrenia.

   

• "Research supports toxoplasmosis link to schizophrenia" (2009-03-11) University of Leeds Media Release
  

  "In addition, the ability of the parasite to make dopamine implies a potential link with other neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease, Tourette’s syndrome and attention deficit disorders, says Dr McConkey. "We’d like to extend our research to look at this possibility more closely."

• Cat’s are parasites themselves – see 3quarksdaily referencing Scientific American
   
• My daughter, much to my horror, has a cat and my grandson is exposed to it.  I’ve been banned from using such phrases as "Evil Kitty" in my grandson’s presence, so I’ve taken to referring to it as "Her Maleficence".  Unfortunately, my hatred of cats doesn’t extend to cruelty, so if it’s bowl of water is dry, I refill it while saying "I am NOT your friend". It doesn’t stop me cheering the local magpies when they taunt the spawn of Satan.

Hat-tipping McSweeney’s:

…and the following lines are hardly less open to misinterpretation than the standard version.

1. no1 b4 me. srsly.
2. dnt wrshp pix/idols
3. no omg’s
4. no wrk on w/end (sat 4 now; sun l8r)
5. pos ok – ur m&d r cool
6. dnt kill ppl
7. :-X only w/ m8
8. dnt steal
9. dnt lie re: bf
10. dnt ogle ur bf’s m8. or ox. or dnkey. myob.

M, pls rite on tabs & giv 2 ppl.
ttyl, JHWH.
ps. wwjd?

What Ben Cousins Actually Meant

An explanation?  Just giving a tip to the reporter who writes about injuries, honest!  What else could it be?

The Senate inquiry into Fairer Private Health Insurance Incentives Bill 2009 and two related bills is seeking public submissions to economics.sen@aph.gov.au until 2009-06-16.

"Fairer"?  Marginally less unfair would be more accurate.

And the unwritten assumption, with thresholds for couples and families twice that of singles is totally inconsistent with benefits to the poorest members of our community – where couples get much less than twice the benefits of singles.

I’ll also take a quick look at the most recent annual reports of a health fund to show how much the unnecessary middle-men are taking.

First, a summary of the reductions in government largesse to the wealthy based on per annum income:

How many people on significant Centrelink benefits get this rebate?  Bugger all!  It’s upper class and corporate welfare plain and simple.

What is worse, there is no incentive for efficiency on the part of the middle-men.  The higher the premium (and profits assuming that benefits are similar), the higher the corporate and upper-class welfare.

Surely the largesse should be constrained to be a proportion only of the lowest premium in the industry – although I’d much rather this largesse be set at 0.

I went looking for the most recent annual report from one of the largest (about 18% of the market) middlemen.  Oddly, there was no 2007-2008 report on MBF’s annual report web page even though it’s almost the end of the 2008-2009 annual report.  I guess it takes a year to fine-tune the spin so that it looks attractive to investors while not looking like a blatant rorter of public funds.

So I’m forced to deal with the 2006-2007 report.  Let’s look at some of the figures:

• Premium Revenue: 2106.3 million
• Benefits Paid: 1872 million
• Health insurance underwriting profit: $69.9 million

Does anybody remember the old mutual benefit health funds a.k.a. "friendly societies"?  Their model was to pay out more than they collected from subscribers, by wise investment of the funds under management.  If they couldn’t do this, they were either incompetent investors or incompetent actuaries – and so would collapse deservedly.

OK, so lets look a bit closer:

• Rebate from government is a third of the premium, 70 million.  This is the same as the profit.
• Difference between revenue and benefits is 234 million.
• This means that it costs 234 – 70 = 164 million to pay rent, salaries, etc.
• Multiply 164 by 100/18, and this means that the health insurance industry Australia-wide spent nearly a billion dollars running itself.
• Approximate government expenditure = 70 * 100/18 = 400 million. (It’s probably closer to half a billion dollars these days)

With 2 billion in funds under management, and assuming even a modest 5% return for simple money-market activity (the cost of capital), that means MBF funds under management should have generated 100 million.  Real investment during boom times in stocks and shares should have been much higher, and should have been better than the increase in the ASX over the same period.

In other words, that health fund, in boom economic times, must have been a hopeless investor, much worse than the old non-profit friendly societies.  The government supplied the equivalent to 100% of it’s profits, so profit from investment of funds under management (less expenses) must have been approximately zero.

What about another one, NIB, now listed on the stock exchange?  From their half-yearly results to 2008-12-31:

• Premium revenue: 410.6 million
• Benefits paid: 201 (hospital) + 95.8 (ancillary) = 297 million
• Double those figures for annualized amounts.
• And this was during a financial crisis!
• So that’s about 200 million out of funds government and people pay for health taken out – to support 422 employees (and a CEO with a rise from $800k to $2.3 mill).

And from NIB’s Annual Operations Report 2007:

• Premium revenue: $666.0 million in contributions (normalized)
• Payouts: $571.1 million in claims, reinsurances and state levies to policyholders during financial year 2007.
• Negative value for policy holders (premium minus payouts): 666 – 571 = 95 million – and that represents even worse value for policy holders when state levies are taken out!

Personally, I’d much rather the government put another $400 million (or more realistically, half a billion) directly into health services, using the money to pay doctors and nurses rather than seemingly incompetent financiers.

It’s also worth noting that as your premium is more than your total payout, you would be better sticking your money in a savings accounts (or even under the mattress) and self-insure.  With the government as sole insurer, providing the same services and the ability to smooth the costs across everybody (let alone distribute the funds fairly) from consolidated revenue, and with the opportunity for greater efficiency through economies of scale, the economy as a whole would have more capital to do something productive.

Notes/See Also:

• UPDATE:On a related issue, smart FOI-ing and wikileaking replayed over at yourdemocracy.net.au shows that the Howard Government was trying to keep doctor numbers low (which of course, pushed prices, and the desire for health insurance, up). "What’s up doc?" (2009-06-03) by John Richardson
   
• I tried to Google "annual report" inside the hba.com.au domain to find revenue and benefits, and also in bupa.com.au (which owns MBF and HBA – or large chunks of them – and "covers" 3 million Australians).  No luck.  Let me know if you can find them.  How come these companies hide their recent annual reports so well?  It’s a fair bet that if those companies were proud of their figures, their locations would be blindingly obvious.
   
• NIB, which is now listed on the ASX, also makes it difficult to get their 2007-08 report. From the Annual reports page, and clicking on the "click here for further nib financial information" you get a "404 error – page moved or deleted", while clicking on "download document" (which points to http://www.nib.com.au/home/newtonib/about/AnnualReports/PDF%20Download generates a "403 error", demanding a secure channel over https and requiring a login, but you can see a copy of the FY2008 NIB annual report using this and the 2009 half-yearly report here.
   
• "Medical benefits – praiseworthy past, modern scamming" (2009-02-19) includes
  

  In other words, clients of the health insurance industry were putting their money (and those of others via government subsidies) into a bank that didn’t give the client money plus interest, but charged people for putting money into deposit accounts, all the while using those funds to loan to others (and collect interest on that)!

  Would the public allow the government to say the taxpayer will fund 30% of your deposits into a bank (i.e. add in 50% of what you deposit), providing that the banks charge you for the privilege of holding your money.

Non-therapeutic male circumcision is discussed in a recent Australian Policy Online report.

Personally, I’d see non-therapeutic male circumcision in the same category as intimate or genital piercing, and covered by a section of the Summary Offences Amendment (Tattooing and Body Piercing) Bill 2008 (Vic) Division 6:

44(2): A body piercer must not perform body piercing on the genitalia, anal region, perineum or nipples of a person under the age of 18 years, whether or not consent has been given to the body piercing.

It’s worth noting that the Current Issues Brief No. 3, 2008 from the Research Service of the Victorian Parliament discusses the Victorian bill, and regulations in other Australian jurisdictions, the paper does not even contain the word circumcision.

The paper also notes circumstances covered by other bills:

• Causing injury or serious injury intentionally, recklessly or negligently, and endangerment offences under sections 16, 17, 18, 23 and 24 of the Crimes Act 1958; and
• Female genital mutilation under section 32 of the Crimes Act.

Some belief systems use the term "circumcision" when genital mutilation is the only realistic term.  Why should the law be sexist?

In the "Purposes" of the bill, the stated intent includes prevention of scarification of those under 18, defined as follows:

scarification means the cutting of the skin of a person to create scar tissue;

Male circumcision, therapeutic or not, certainly creates scar tissue!

The 2008 bill gives reasonable protection for surgeons (presumably to cover therapeutic procedures):

43A (1) Nothing in this Division applies to body piercing performed in good faith—

• in the course of a regulated health service provided by a registered health practitioner; or
• in the course of clinical training by a registered student.

In the 2008 bill, it is explicitly stated that "regulated health service" has the same meaning as in the Health Professions Registration Act 2005 (Vic):

regulated health service means a health service usually provided in a regulated health profession

A religious activity is not a health service!

Section 44 makes no bones about intimate piercings of those under 18 – parental consent and/or the wishes of the child simply do not matter.  It is an offence.  Full stop.

Now I have no problem with a religiously-motivated circumcision of an adult.  It’s their problem, and indeed, it’s good for rational society because there is the chance that a firm believer in any faith will not be able to procreate as the result of the circumcision.

Let’s look at the Judaic and Christian so-called logic in particular:

• A child cannot confirm their religious adherence until they are adolescents, notably 13 for Judaic males.
• Genital mutilation for religious reasons should surely require the informed consent of the subject as to both the religion and the process.

So, by their own logic, a non-reversible procedure carried out as part of religious adherence should not be carried out on pre-teens – parental consent or not.

It’s really no different from Munchausens By Proxy, although the perpetrators are not clinically insane, even though they are patently irrational (indeed belief with no rational inquiry is regarded as a virtue).

The paper published at the APO comes originally from the Tasmanian Law Reform Institute and includes the following (my bolding):

The Institute received the reference from the Commissioner for Children who is a member of the Council of Obstetric and Paediatric Mortality and Morbidity. The Commissioner asked the Institute to investigate the legal issues relating to the circumcision of males under the age of majority. The Commissioner was concerned that some procedures, when performed without medical indication and without the competent consent of the child, may traverse the rights of children.

Circumcision satisfies the legal definition of both wounding and assault.

Young children, infants in particular, may be unable to communicate consent and would almost certainly not be able to understand the nature of a circumcision procedure. Thus infants, and most young children, will not be able to provide consent that might make a circumcision lawful.

Section 2A(2)(e) of the Tasmanian Code provides that there is no free agreement when a person: "agrees or submits because he or she is overborne by the nature or position of another person."

No legislation in Tasmania provides a general power for parents to make legal, through their consent or authorisation, what would otherwise be an offence to their children.

Common law cases contain non-binding statements suggesting that a person who circumcises a child is not criminally responsible for the act if the child’s parents consented to, or authorised, the procedure. The basis for this proposition is uncertain.

Would non-therapeutic circumcision of the child of atheists be legal?  Would a jury decide differently based on the religion position of one or both parents?

Where the paper cites arguments in favor of allowing circumcision without consent, those arguments are tortuous, and designed to satisfy the irrational beliefs of powerful religious groups.

It seems to me that any organization that promotes or even accepts the genital mutilation of infants is no better than a child pornography ring, and should be declared an illegal organization.  Actually, there are more parallels with a child abuse network than a child pornography ring.

It also seems to me that prohibiting female "circumcision" while allowing the analogous procedure on a male infant without compelling therapeutic need, is merely enshrining sexism and religious apartheid in law.

It must stop.

See Also:

• The ‘cruellist cut’ may also be illegal
• The other thing is that it could also come under federal laws against terrorist acts, which include "religiously motivated violence"