Club Troppo

Akismet didn’t know if this was spam or not – but it is.

The very root of your writing whilst appearing agreeable at first, did not really settle properly with me personally after some time. Someplace within the sentences you actually were able to make me a believer but just for a while. I nevertheless have a problem with your leaps in assumptions and one might do nicely to help fill in all those gaps. When you actually can accomplish that, I could certainly be fascinated.

From ‘Willie Conrad” who’s url doesn’t get replicated here.  Why is it do hard to write spam comments that aren’t obviously spam?

This post is merely two additions to previous posts, neither of which warranted a post on their own.

The first relates to this post from September where I talked about the idea of realtime mapping of bus services using GPS data.  Better people than I had the same idea and, through the Apps4NSW competition, Flink Labs has produced this prototype for Sydney and Newcastle buses. I think it’s great. I may have anticipated the means by which it would come (Google maps and Government 2.0) but I got the timing way out – I thought it would take years. Hopefully the new government will run with it so it becomes more phone friendly.

The other relates to my speculations on the paucity of Filipino restaurants. One hypothesis I didn’t mention is that Filipino migrants might be less prone than  other migrant groups to cluster into certain suburbs (the way we can see suburbs that are notably “Greek” or “Vietnamese” for instance), so that that a given restaurant would struggle to have a local returning customer base within it’s own community. This could be plausible if Filipino migrants have better English skills (due to American colonialism) and are therefore less likely to seek other speakers of their language to live near. Alternatively, the gender imbalance and associated exogamy may mean they are more geographically spread out.

I didn’t feel this hypothesis explained much (hence I didn’t mention it), but I kept it in mind. The other day I was using CData to map 2006 census data on migrant groups for an unrelated question (on which I’ll probably post in future), but this gave me the opportunity to compare Filipino settlement to some other groups. Notably I compared residency in Sydney and Melbourne by people born in the Phillipines with those born in two other countries, Korea and India. I chose these two because their periods of migration roughly coincide with Filipino migration, so they’d be facing similar house prices and job opportunities which would alter their choices relative to post war migrants. Additionally, unlike the Vietnamese or Lebanese (or more recently East Africans), there’d be no refugee aspect where settlement would be dictated by government decisions. Furthermore, Korean and Indian restaurants are abundant. The comparison is still flawed of course.

The maps (and some notes) are below the fold. I can see some element of greater concentration amongst Koreans and Indians, at least in Sydney (and in places where you’d find many restaurants in said cuisines), but not nearly enough to explain the disparity. The concentration of Filipinos in the spur of settlement between Blacktown and Penrith is notable – half the Filipino restaurants I know of in Sydney are in Blacktown (i.e two). Maybe there’s a lack of suitable commercial real estate there?

I don’t think there’s more for this hypothesis though, but you can look for yourself.

(Continued)

{This is the original version of an article that appeared from Dec to February in two installments in the Canberra Times}

Australia has an official policy, pursued by the Ministry of Finance and Deregulation, on the relationship between government and the web that attempts to outline how the government will take advantage of the ‘opportunities’ opened up by the web. Similar undertakings are in progressin many countries where governments are struggling to come to terms with the role of government in the online age. ‘Our’ policy, which is still under construction, has been kicked off by accepting 12 of the 13 recommendations of the ‘Gov 2.0 taskforce’  led by Nicholas Gruen.

In this blog I will attempt to sketch the political economy of the enterprise so that it might become clearer, to those schooled in the language of markets and incentives, what is going on. The three main tenets of gov 2.0 as I see it are to put lots of documentation online, to tap into the free lunch of online volunteerism, and to make money from the government’s unique ability to identify you and tax you. Apart from talking you through these three main tenets, I will also try to dispel some particularly confusing myths doing the rounds about gov 2.0, in particular the idea that gov 2.0 will lead to more ‘participatory democracy’.

(Continued)

How could you compare the health systems of the world in terms of outcomes with plausible verisimilitude, in other words by making assumptions that don’t just give you junk? I was sceptical when I read of this index, but think it’s a pretty good, though like any such exercise it’s not hard to see that it’s not perfect.  Anyway, Bob Hahn and Peter Passell’s regulation2point0 newsletter drew my attention to this paper. And this is how they explain the methodology.

In order to provide a more precise measure of the outcomes that may legitimately be attributed to health care interventions, researchers have developed the concept of “mortality amenable to health care”. Amenable  mortality  is  generally  defined  as  premature  deaths  that  should  not  occur  in  the  presence  of effective and timely care. It takes into account premature deaths for a list of diseases, for which effective health interventions are deemed to exist and might prevent deaths before a certain age limit (usually 75, though sometimes lower).

From Three Quarks

The perils of writing about Ramanujan, as I did in my last 3QD column, is that there will always be those who insist that a better educated Ramanujan would have been a worse mathematician. One response is to say that by the same token a worse educated Euler would have been a better mathematician, an argument that to my knowledge has never been made, another is to relate a remarkable story that parallels the tale of Ramanujan. A story that is reasonably well known within the world of chess but has somehow escaped the attention of the world outside.

In the telling of the story much of what I quote is borrowed from several sources, the most important being a compilation by Edward Winter. The material available is insufficient to piece together a life but it is enough to outline the story. In 1929, a man from Sargodha in Punjab arrived in England, part of the entourage of a Nawab. He had learnt chess in the Indian way, the modern form played in the West had some significant modifications, and he finished last in the first tournament he played. He learnt from the experience and within months went on to win the British Chess Championship, repeating the feat in 1932 and 1933. He also played top board for Britain in three chess Olympiads registering impressive performances against some of the top players in the world.  His one game against the Cuban world champion Jose Raul Capablanca was a victorious masterpiece, and is counted among the great games of all times. And then in 1933 he disappeared, headed back to what is today Pakistan with his patron, never to play competitive international chess again.

The talented chess player and writer Reuben Fine, a contemporary, has written of him:

The story of the Indian Sultan Khan turned out to be a most unusual one. The “Sultan” was not the term of status that we supposed it to be; it was merely a first name. In fact, Sultan Khan was actually a kind of serf on the estate of a maharajah when his chess genius was discovered. He spoke English poorly, and kept score in Hindustani. It was said that he could not even read the European notations.

(Continued)

Three things emerged from qanda last night.

The first was that Malcolm Turnbull is out of control, and thinks he can undermine Tony Abbott at will. So there’s some fun in store.

The other two are closely related. One is that, whatever Bill Shorten learned in his MBA at the Melbourne Business School, it didn’t equip him with basic economic intuition. The other is that, despite the lessons of Rudd’s failed greenhouse legislation, the Government still hasn’t has figured out how to explain the concept of carbon pricing to the electorate.

An audience member had the inspired idea of posing the John Hewson question: What will the carbon tax do to the price of a birthday cake?

Shorten’s answer, to paraphrase only slightly, was: waffle, waffle waffle; waffle waffle, waffle. It might have been that he wanted to avoid a truthful answer, but one couldn’t rule out the possibility that, like Hewson, he simply couldn’t figure it out on the spot. (Continued)

Like Canadian UQ legal academic James Allan, former NSW Premier Bob Carr is a vehement long-term opponent of a bill or charter of rights for Australia (or any  State). A post on Carr’s blog only last week confirms that his attitude has not mellowed:

More judge-made law a fine thing for Australia? Endless litigation over the meaning of rights?  The prospect of Australia being saddled with a charter of rights is continuing to recede, with Tasmania today announcing such a document is now off the agenda because of budgetary restraints.

The government has other reform priorities, according to Attorney General and former Premier, David Bartlet.

These attitudes are quite strange when you actually compare this rhetoric with the modest reality of the existing charters of rights in Victoria and the ACT, not to mention that Carr is an unabashed fan of just about everything else American. I used to be a moderate bill of rights skeptic myself, but more recently I’ve become a cautious supporter partly because of cases like that of Haneef and the continuing saga of abuses of migration detention in Australia.  Last year I even lodged a submission to the federal Human Rights Consultation chaired by Father Frank Brennan,  in conjunction with Colin McDonald QC and frequent Troppo commenter Patrick.  We advocated a very conservative bill of rights enacted by ordinary federal legislation and merely extending existing Commonwealth Constitution rights to bind the States (where possible); and adding a general guarantee of due process and equal protection like the US Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. We also advocated provisions against slavery, torture and capital punishment, which I doubt even Bob Carr would regard as dangerously liberal.  However we strongly argued that broader social, economic and group rights should not under any circumstances be included.

The practical reality of Victoria’s Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities is well described in a 2009 article by Labor lawyer and MLC Brian Tee.  It’s subscription only but here’s a substantial extract:

(Continued)