Yearly Archives: 2009

Nice CC-BY images for Christmas Bleg

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I’m dreadful at Christmas Cards. I don’t think much of signing hundreds and having them sent off by a secretary, so if I do write them I try to write a bit on them, otherwise I can’t see the point.

I’m dead late this year again – though with a bit of an excuse – and the cards are coming in like those eagle borne letters to Harry Potter’s address when he’s staying with the muggles. In any event it occurred to me it might be nice to send emails with Flickr pictures or any other creative commons licensed pictures in emails.  Please post links to such pickies – or just your favourite (nice) Flickr images for our delectation, and remember, thanks to our Webmeister Jacques handiwork, you can also post the images themselves up here in comments.

Web 2.0 and the public service: the column

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Here’s today’s column in the SMH which was slightly edited back from the original.

Who is Julie Hempenstall? She lives in Bendigo and she likes reading Australias historic newspapers. The National Library has hoisted its collection on the net and had them digitised by computers. I can see what keeps her there. Hard at work drafting this article I just spent the last hour reading about early Sydney about the Governors plan for a school for aboriginal boys and girls to improve the Energies of this innocent, destitute, and unoffending race. It wasnt a raging success.

Anyway, the computer digitisation of that article was full of mistakes. Why? Optical character recognition isnt perfect even with clean print and certainly not with two hundred year old, stained, yellowed newspapers with antiquated fonts or fontfs as it was printed in 1788. But people like Julie have pored over the articles and the Librarys clever crowdsourcing website allows them to correct mistakes they find.

Its addictive. I found the obituary of an extraordinary Englishman William Stanley Jevons who was an architect of modern economics. He turned up in Sydney in his teens in 1854 and was a busy fellow. He became assayer to our mint, was newspaper photographer in Australia (strictly a hobby) and the first to document the El Nino effect. Reading all the digitised mistakes I just couldnt help myself. He didnt gain an honorary degree from the Umversity of Odinburgh. It was the University of Edinburgh. Anyway its fixed now.

This bit of crowdsourcing has been a huge success. Continue reading →

Good work, George Monbiot

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Jumping the shark

Untill Tuesday night Ian Plimer was the respectable face of climate scepticism in Australia. Plimer looks the part of the distinguished professor, and as a geologist gives the impression of understanding the long run forces affecting the earth’s climate, as opposed to the ephemera that excite the global warming alarmists. On top of that, he was known as as an eloquent debunker of creationism, which earned him credibility as a rational mind as well as immunity from accusations of rightwing ratbaggery. A non-scientist, concerned citizen, while appreciating the significance of the IPCC findings, could still hold some doubts about global warming as long as someone like Plimer disputed the consensus position.

But on Lateline it all came crashing down. The eminent Plimer looked like a rat in a trap. Tim Lambert summed it up nicely :

Rather than admit to making any error at all, Plimer ducks, weaves, obfuscates, recites his favourite catch phrase, tries to change the subject and fabricates some more. When confronted with the fact that the USGS says (backed with scientific papers) that human activities emit 130 times as much CO2 as volcanoes, Plimer claims that the USGS doesn’t count underwater volcanoes. When told that the USGS specifically said that they do count undersea volcanoes, Plimer invented a story about how the nature of the rocks under the ocean proves that there must be unobserved emissions.

Continue reading →

What use is utility?

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"The concept of utility in economics refers to the pleasure, or relief of pain, associated with the consumption of goods and services" writes economist John Quiggin. Another economist, Robert Frank, suggests that it is closer to the idea of satisfaction. In Luxury Fever he writes: "The analogous construct in the psychological literature is subjective well-being, a composite measure of overall life satisfaction." This kind of talk outrages the philosophically trained Will Wilkinson who writes:

Conceptually, happiness has nothing to with utility in economics, nor does subjective well-being, or subjective satisfaction. Utility is way of representing an ordering of preferences. It simply isn’t a psychological concept, nor a value concept, nor does it imply either. A utility function is just a little machine in which you can put an ordering of preferences, a pair of alternatives, and have something that somebody decided to call a “utility” assigned to each alternative, the most preferred getting the greater utility.

Wilkinson complains that economists talk about "in a most confusing and haphazard fashion". And it’s true. Some economists who are extraordinarily fastidious about their formal work become careless and sloppy when talking in words or discussing the policy implications of their work. I don’t think this is true for Quiggin, but it’s certainly true for others.

Continue reading →

A stray thought about exam questions

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Having just finished the final units I need to qualify for an undergraduate degree, the topic of examinations is still fresh in my mind. Generally these fall into two categories: open-book and closed-book; with two major categories of question: multiple-choice and short-answer.

The exact mix of open/closed and MC/SA will vary from professor to professor and course to course. It can also vary based on the nature of the field and the ratio of teaching staff to students. As a law student I faced a common theme of open-book short-answer exams. During an “intro to psych” unit, all exams were multiple choice — there were 600 students in the course and two lecturers.

But all of these formats have one thing in common: the exam questions are secrets.

Continue reading →

Paul Samuelson 1915-2009

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How will Paul Samuelson be remembered? This is the positive side of the story, the glowing record of  the Nobel Laureate and author of the most widely read textbook in modern times.

History may be kind to Samuelson. He had the good fortune to surf three waves that carried all before them, for a time. The waves were the General Theory of Keynes, the Big Government welfare state and Mathematics. To capture the mood of the Keynesian revolution he recycled a famous response to the French Revolution “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven! …”.

It is likely that critical scholarship will be less kind. He may be remembered as the man who thought that the Soviet economy was robust and rapidly overhauling the US. The man who was relaxed and comfortable with Keynesian stimulation of the economy. The man who thought that the Austrians are rubbish. I think he was wrong on all three counts.

An essay topic ”Compare and contrast the outcomes of the French and Keynesian revolutions”.

Dear Woolworths

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Stop trying to make me use your crappy “self serve” checkouts.

I noticed you installed them a few months back. A few weeks ago, out of curiousity, I tried it.

It was just that: a curiousity. My experience went as follows:

  1. I was reminded of my first job as a checkout operator, which I utterly detested. It was with your company, actually, at the Big W in Darwin. Your managers there were incompetent and mean-spirited. I guess they got promoted to head office. I do not see doing a job I hate for free as progress.
  2. I am out of practice. A normal checkout operator is much faster and has a good idea of efficiently packing the bags.
  3. You still needed someone to verify my credit card signature. This took longer than it would at a normal checkout. No, I will not use a credit card PIN. I happen to like the additional legal protection the signature gives me.

So basically you want me to provide free labour, waste more of my own time and get crappy service from a grumpy curmudgeon (me). No bloody thanks.

It’s obvious you’re really keen on these machines. Today you closed the express checkouts so that I would either have to queue up with the trolleys or go through your stupid, rubbish, useless, dodgy, crappy, dumb, time-wasting, moronic, transparently grasping self-serve aisles. I chose to queue with the trolleys.

I noticed today that your competitors at Coles haven’t installed these machines. Indeed their express checkouts were fully staffed. And so, from now on, I will refuse to purchase my groceries at Woolies. I will be buying my petrol at Shell. I will be avoiding Dan Murphy’s and Dick Smith.

You, the Board and Executives of Woolworths, are a pack of wankers. I hope to see you resigning or being sacked with no bonuses. Thereafter I will look forward to the news that you are all rotting in a special hell where you are required to torture yourselves.

Yours Sincerely,

An ex-customer.