The Canberra Times published today an opinion piece of mine on a topic I have been writing about since late November and is familiar to Club Troppo readers. My original version is set out below. For various reasons, I may not be able to respond to comments quickly. Sorry.
A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill
Australian
The Worst of Perth sculpts former WA Premier Geoff Gallop and yearns for his return in the context of chair-sniffing revelations about the current Opposition Leader: |
Andrew Bartlett suggests the IOC has lost the plot on the Olympic spirit – and maybe his current committee has lost the plot on Aboriginal policy (I’m not too sure what Gummo – who I think inserted this item – is getting at here – KP).
International
Derek Barry looks at how the Nigerian oil strike might affect oil prices.
Guantanamo prosecutor, Moe Davis’s testimony in the trial of Osama bin Laden’s driver catches the attention of
Richard Tonkin, clarencegirl, beju and Kim.
Dan Miller is appalled by the latest utterances of Obama’s retired pastor Rev Jeremiah Wright (here’s a news story summarising what he said), including re 9/11: “You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you.” Norman Geras comments:
Not only is Wright rather selective in what he takes from the Bible, since somewhere in it there will be an injunction against killing the innocent, he himself is innocent of the understanding that guilt is not acquired simply through community membership, much less by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Of course, whether this exacerbates Obama’s inability to clinch the Democratic Party nomination is another question. Meanwhile, Joshua Gans draws attention to a bizarre Clinton/McCain policy (which thankfully Obama at least apparently doesn’t endorse) for a pause in petrol taxes but with lost revenues being made up by taxing the oil companies!!!
Turcopolier sees promising signs of a peace deal between Israel and Syria.
At openDemocracy, Roger Southall posts a superb article on tha appalling Thabo Mbeki’s efforts at “mediation” in Zimbabwe and his waning fortunes within the ANC. Highly recommended reading.
Andrew Leigh grumbles about middle class welfare and (quoting Peter Martin) reports on a motted Rudd government plan for first home savers’ accounts that give twice as much to the rich as the poor. Good one Kev!
I was listening to a podcast of a BBC interview with Ian “Supercrunchers” Ayres. Supercrunchers is a book which illustrates all the ways in which the ‘new econometrics’ or ‘social stats’ is revolutionising – well lets not get carried away – improving the judgement of all sorts of people in making important decisions in many walks of life.
Anyway, and I’m sorry I can’t find the podcast – it was late 2007 on the BBC world service – he observed that stats should be taught in schools. Generally probability is taught in schools but very little stats. As Ayres said, stats is hugely useful in life. A good exposure to stats in school would be useful throughout life. Calculus is a wonderful thing. Its elegance still excites me. But it’s of much less general use in later life – unless you turn out to be a calculus using adult.
I’m not suggesting doing away with the rest of the curriculum, or skewing it entirely towards direct usefulness in later life, but there’s nothing wrong with pushing it towards usefulness. I remember doing oodles of stuff that was not particularly elegant, not a particularly good education in mathematics, when I was doing it. Trigonometry, more calculus than we should have. We should have done some stats. And if we wanted to be ‘purer’ about it, we should have done more set theory and less trigonometry.
Reminds me of some of my views on the use (or rather, very tepid use) of spreadsheets in schools.
The updated copy of TinyMCE embedded in Wordpress 2.5 has bog ordinary indent and outdent buttons, of this approximate appearance: 
.
This button essentially just adds a few extra tags in the HTML that say “push this over to the right by 20 pixels”. That would be fine, except that it buggers up a bunch of other formatting rules set by the stylesheet.
The right thing to do is to use “semantic” markup. For quotes, one should use the blockquote tag. For lists, use the list tags. And so on: these are correctly laid out by the stylesheet which has been carefully tweaked by CSS gurus before I, or Wordpress, gets to mangle them.
If, like I do, you want to turn those buttons off in Wordpress, it’s a bit fiddly. The settings for the rich text editor are buried in wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php. Scroll down to the 128th line, which will look something like so:
$mce_buttons_2 = apply_filters('mce_buttons_2', array('formatselect', 'underline',
'justifyfull', 'forecolor', '|', 'pastetext', 'pasteword'...
This line tells the rich text editor what buttons to display. Delete or comment out this bit:
'|', 'outdent', 'indent',
And voila, the offending buttons go away.
This is essentially par for the course for Wordpress.org, of course. A shiny update which breaks things in stupid ways. They talk a lot about their you-beaut new interface (which I don’t think is much of an improvement on the old one), their fancy new uploading scheme (which is less convenient than the boring old one) and their exciting new … well as far as I can tell it was all about shiny things. Not so much about fixing boring bugs for the most part.
It annoys me because I have to bug Ken and Nick to let me upgrade to get access to security patches, which Wordpress.org don’t backport to older versions. Every time I hope it will be a smooth update. Every time I am made to look like a fool.
A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill
Australian
Mark Shorter’s upcoming performance at MOP projects explores patriarchal modes of power and exchange. The performance will employ the symbol of the golden Tabuk rifle, a version of the AK-47 that was produced by Saddam Hussein for his personal guard. It was also the gun that was donated to the Australian War Museum by the United States Army as a token of gratitude for our participation in the Iraq war. (via The Art Life) |
Mark Richardson parses Ted Baillieu and sees the discarding of communal identity.
Gary Sauer-Thompson sees signs of movement on water reform. But Lyn Hanrahan Calcutt thinks we’re stuffed on other fronts.
Jim Belshaw has a terrible feeling of deja vu.
David Jeffery looks at the excise on Alcopops, while Tony the Teacher selfishly advocates a more drastic solution from a position of almost inconceivable deprivation.
International
Kevin Rennie on the selling of Iraq.
John Quiggin forms a strange alliance with former Malaysian PM Mahathir in looking forward to Bush, Blair and Howard being charged with war crimes over Iraq.
Tim Blair covers a journalistic groundswell of disenchantment with Barack Obama, while Steve Chapman dissects Hillary’s serpentine manouevrings:
She thinks McCain is better than Obama and McCain is no better than Bush. Which can mean only one thing: Bush is better than Obama!
Of course that’s probably not what she actually believes. But it’s a tribute to her talent for bold deceit and bizarre logic that she can attack Obama for doing something that she herself had done so recently, and more fervently.
I have about three draft posts, all unfinished on a particular theme which I have touched on once before here. The general theme is the growing viability of doing well by doing good. One of the posts was called Googlenomics and referred to the massive amount of <jargon>consumer surplus</jargon> produced by business models like Google where massive value is created and the firm goes about trying to privatise a very small fraction of it.
I was also going to mention a typically interesting and provocative post by Steve Randy Waldman where talks about ‘character’ and capitalism and ends up with this proposal
T.S. Eliot once wrote, “It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good.” Perhaps the art is to come up with a system, however imperfect, under which being good is the best way to succeed.
That’s a worthwhile thing to think about too.
There are lots of things to be said here. But the purpose for my finally breaking into the published post mode is to announce the fact that Paul Graham has had a good go at this issue and, like me concludes that doing well by doing good is a business model whose time may have come. He doesn’t say so in so many words, and his focus is on start ups. And one of the things he doesn’t seem to say (though I read his piece quickly) is that all this is made possible by the scalability that the net gives things – the way in which it reduces to near zero cost the rolling out of some service or provision of information to hundreds of millions of users (and billions when they get access to the net). Edited highlights are below the fold.
A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Jen McCulloch and Stephen Hill
Australian
The new Political Compass per Gummo Trotsky |
Kev Gillett believes the only effect increasing excise on pre-mix drinks will be a lot of money for the government.
Mel Gregg is preparing for Labour Day.
Dave Bath finds spam more informative than media releases from politicians.
Norman Geras marks the death of journalist Pamela Bone from cancer, as do Darlene Taylor and Tim Blair.
International
Harry Clark holds no punches harshing on the Chinese government. *Kev Gillet indulges in some good old fashion paranoia, speculating about Hu organised the pro-chinese protesters in Canberra. Ken Lovell appreciates the multiple ironies of the event.
At openDemocracy, Andrew Nickson looks at election results in Paraguay and examines the implications of the return of Silvio Berlusconi in Italy.
Dan Miller on American politics (although the logic arguably applies equally to Australia):
In a heterogeneous country the size of the United States, there are many constituencies and the candidate who best pleases the most, wins. The only way to do that is to offer inconsistent solutions and hope that their incoherence is not noticed.
I’ve never known. Anyway, I’ve discovered a blogger I’d not read before – a stroppy femmo who’s a great read – who seems to have similar views to mine. Go and have a good squiz around her site.