Club Troppo

I’m trying to find the above mentioned person for a one off consulting job – for a friend’s work, not Lateral Economics.

Any suggestions?

From the General Achievement Test for the Victorian Certificate of Education sat today.

The image of the Australian outback on the next page was painted by Russell Drysdale.

Pamela Bell described the painting in the following terms.

Man reading a Paper is one of the most surreal of Drysdale’s paintings of the early 1940s. For the first time, Drysdale incorporated pieces of corrugated iron and a windmill, motifs which at times appear abstract. A sense of ambiguity is heightened by the suggestion of actions taking place in an internal rather than external environment. Instead of sitting in a lounge chair reading a paper, the mail figure rests on a tree stump, with his jacket hung on the nearest branch. The subject’s indifference to the strange scene around him only heightens the viewer’s feeling of unease.

Bell sees the painting as

1. eerie
2. tragic
3. tranquil
4. celebratory

The seated figure in the painting seems

1. at home in the landscape
2. a victim of the landscape
3. alienated from the landscape
4. the destroyer of the landscape (Continued)

A while ago I listened to some lectures to learn a bit about neurology. One topic that came up was Source Amnesia. This describes a human tendency to remember things like statements and facts, but not the context in which one heard them and the caveats, explicit or not, that came with the statement.

Here is the same Sam Wang in the NYT.

I had no picture, so why not something a little less heteronormative than the usual random picture choice (From the classy but very NSFW Jess Fink)

“The brain does not simply gather and stockpile information as a computer’s hard drive does. Facts are stored first in the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain about the size and shape of a fat man’s curled pinkie finger. But the information does not rest there. Every time we recall it, our brain writes it down again, and during this re-storage, it is also reprocessed. In time, the fact is gradually transferred to the cerebral cortex and is separated from the context in which it was originally learned. For example, you know that the capital of California is Sacramento, but you probably don’t remember how you learned it.

This phenomenon, known as source amnesia, can also lead people to forget whether a statement is true. Even when a lie is presented with a disclaimer, people often later remember it as true.

With time, this misremembering gets worse. A false statement from a noncredible source that is at first not believed can gain credibility during the months it takes to reprocess memories from short-term hippocampal storage to longer-term cortical storage. As the source is forgotten, the message and its implications gain strength.”

The article, and this one on the same topic go on to describe the problem in light of political rumours (especially the Obama = secret muslim rumours that were present in the then presidential race) and how the patently false can become entrenched in many heads. They also describe the role of repetition in enforcing beliefs, as it is (unconciously) interpreted as evidence that the belief is widespread.

This has many alarming implications, especially for political media coverage and public debate.

It makes any media bias that exists more troubling. I used to be comforted by the fact that while there was little respect for truth or intellectual honesty in Australian media, particularly in the dominant player (News Ltd), I had no reason to expect that most media consumers were any more credulous or passive than I. After all, they report an opinion of media ethics that is very low.  I also think the idea that everyone is is credulous is misanthropic. But it turns out that it doesn’t matter. Skepticism of a source is no use when you forget it. Bullshit oft repeated, whether in the form of dishonest bias or just bad fact checking, is dangerous even when people are sensible and skeptical.

The effects of bad media habits are amplified. Framing any announcement as a conflict (inventing opposition if needed); the industry standard of treating rent seekers and PR spivs as content providers; using weasel words and reverse ferrets to publish statements that are unverified or demonstrably false etc.. All potentially more dangerous than I thought. It doesn’t help that the journalists are prone to the same amnesia, which might be why an opinion can quickly solidify into the kind of groupthink Ken Parish criticized earlier, which can then be transferred to consumers. (Continued)

Below is my column today from Crikey.

This gives me as much of a sense of satisfaction as my involvement in the Button Plan with the recipe for success following much the same formula. Get a small possie as an ‘insider’, get some bearings on where policy should be heading and then persuade as many other insiders as you can.  Persevere (in both cases for well over a year) through all the strange twists and turns of the political machinations – which is to say not just through Parliament, but through departments, individual offices and so on. And always remember, you may not have much power, but if you have a good, simple grasp of what’s wrong and how it can be made better, if you understand how the pieces fit together, your ideas may be able to be more useful to the various players at pretty much every stage of the process from crafting the basic lines of the policy to finalising the details.

Kim Carr’s announcement yesterday of cross bench support for the Government’s new R&D tax concession is an important win – for the Government and for innovation in Australia. The Greens have also chosen the right, rather than the easiest decision.

John Button was proud of the research and development (R&D) tax concession he introduced in 1985. It led the world, but was also a masterpiece of perversity from which our many imitators managed to learn.

It entitled firms to claim 150 per cent of their R&D expenditure thus lowering their tax liability. But two huge problems went unaddressed for far too long.

First, many of the most innovative firms – particularly start-ups – are in tax loss and so have no immediate tax liability which the concession can offset. Pharmaceutical start-ups paid the additional compliance costs to qualify for the concession for six or more years of losses. But some never made profits and quite a few of the successes found themselves unable to access their tax losses because corporate restructuring as they moved into expansion triggered the anti-tax loss trading provisions of the Tax Act.

Second, accountants found ways to write off very large proportions of production expenditure as ‘directly related’ to R&D under the legislation. For instance mining often involves relatively small R&D projects to deal with specific geological issues which are then proven up in normal production. Following some judicial decisions in 2000 “whole of mine” claims burgeoned. Two years ago mining passed manufacturing as the highest claimant on the scheme. (Canada’s miners’ R&D comes in at less than a tenth of its manufacturers’ R&D!) Meanwhile there was evidence that Australian manufacturers were gearing up for some ‘whole of production’ claims themselves. (Continued)

No – at least in this case.

Do Illegal Copies of Movies Reduce the Revenue of Legal Products? The case of TV animation in Japan, byy Tatsuo Tanaka

Whether or not illegal copies circulating on the internet reduce the sales of legal products has been a hot issue in the entertainment industries. Though much empirical research has been conducted on the music industry, research on the movie industry has been very limited. This paper examines the effects of the movie sharing site Youtube and file sharing program Winny on DVD sales and rentals of Japanese TV animation programs. Estimated equations of 105 anime episodes show that (1) Youtube viewing does not negatively affect DVD rentals, and it appears to help raise DVD sales; and (2) although Winny file sharing negatively affects DVD rentals, it does not affect DVD sales. Youtube’s effect of boosting DVD sales can be seen after the TV’s broadcasting of the series has concluded, which suggests that not just a few people learned about the program via a Youtube viewing. In other words YouTube can be interpreted as a promotion tool for DVD sales.

Does anyone know a place I can load a chess game (in pgn) and then embed it on a blog – for people to play?

I couldn’t help thinking that the media’s obsession with presenting a superficial appearance of ideological balance might have gone a little too far when I discovered that The Age has not only a religion correspondent but an atheism columnist.   The latter rather crassly bills himself as “Godless” Gross.  This week Gross went toe-to-toe with the ABC’s God-botherer correspondent Scott Stephens on the vexed question of the penchant of too many Catholic clergy to molest children.

Both wrote columns about a recent Catholic Church-commissioned major report on the subject by John Jay College, but reached diametrically opposed conclusions about causation.  Gross puts the kiddie-fiddling down to priestly frustration born of unnatural celibacy. Stephens on the other hand adopts the John Jay College line that there was an epidemic of it in the 60s and 70s, probably caused by a combination of poor priestly recruitment decisions, dodgy training and the temptations of the Swinging Sixties.  He cites figures showing that the reporting of priestly abuse was much lower before the 60s and has subsequently tailed off (so to speak) over the last couple of decades.  Accordingly, Stephens argues that celibacy can’t be to blame because it was a constant factor throughout.  The child-molesting epidemic must have had another cause:

This line of reasoning has been characterized as the “blame Woodstock explanation,” designed to give the Catholic Church some alibi for its crimes. It does no such thing. Indeed, there can be no more damning indictment than that the Church had so imbibed the proclivities of the age that it reproduced them in its own life.

That being said, only someone who is wilfully naive or intractably bigoted would refuse to acknowledge that the social antinomianism and fetishization of sexual liberation in the 1960s and 70s, along with the valorization of the pursuit of individual pleasure and free experimentation with transgressive sexual practices, created the conditions for a dramatic escalation in deviant behaviour – including paedophilia – both within and without the Church.

But surely there is another and rather more plausible explanation which doesn’t exonerate the bizarre institution of priestly celibacy quite so glibly. Is it not likely that priestly child abuse was just as prevalent before the 1960s but drastically under-reported because of the general prevailing social repression about matters sexual?  Recent reports about the treatment of Aboriginal children and child migrants in Church homes through the 1940s and 50s rather suggest some such explanation.  And is it not likely that apparent reductions in child abuse reports from the 1980s onwards are explained by the very permissiveness that the 60s ushered in? The Stephens/John Jay College explanation appears to rest on a tacit but patently spurious assumption that we’re now in a post-permissive age of latter day prudery where vulnerable young priests are no longer subject to licentious temptations.   In reality, children are much more sexually aware today, so priests who might otherwise be tempted by pre-pubescent flesh know that they’re unlikely to get away with it.  Perhaps better clergy selection and training has played a role too.  You’d certainly hope so.

Someone in the ABC recommended the Foreign Correspondent of a couple of weeks ago which can be seen on iView – amazing scenes of the Japanese tsunami. Watch it if you can – pretty spellbinding I’d say. And I’ve been listening to ‘First Person‘ on weekday mornings, which is a series of 15 or perhaps 20 minute autobiographical readings. It’s very often not available for download because of the prospect of selling cassettes (with a pitifully small chance of making any serious money from it I suspect).  But in fact, they seem to be letting up at the ABC these days and I recommend “10 Hail Marys” for downloading. A very gutsy pregnant 15 year old Catholic girl fighting all the odds to keep her baby.  Normally I’d not be particularly sympathetic to such a quest – who knows whether keeping the baby was right for the baby? – and this isn’t normally the kind of narrative I’m drawn to, but it’s an amazing story. Not many 15 year olds would have the guts and presence of mind not to give in against all that pressure.

According to the ABC’s Barrie Cassidy “even the most popular decisions taken by this government [are] essentially public relations disasters”.  It’s one of those self-fulfilling media memes, resulting partly from Labor’s deficient PR skills and partly from Tony Abbott’s cynical, relentless negativism, but even more so from the media’s own determination to portray a picture of muddle and crisis whether it actually makes any sense or not in a given situation.

The current situation with asylum seekers is quite a good example.  How many Australians are aware, for example, that the number of asylum seekers arriving by boat since Julia Gillard announced the “Malaysia Solution” almost 6 weeks ago has fallen by more than fifty percent compared with last year?¹1. KP: Compare last year’s total of 6,879 with the 300 or so who have arrived since Gillard’s announcement. [↩] Of course Tony Abbott is claiming that the deterrent effect flows from the SIEV sinking tragedy at Christmas Island late last year and no doubt that is a factor.  But at the very least you’d expect that such a large drop in arrival numbers might have dampened media enthusiasm for the simplistic “government in crisis on asylum seekers” line. Announcing the Malaysia Solution before a final deal had been done might have been a high risk strategy for Gillard, but it’s a strategy that so far has actually worked!

An even more egregious example of media groupthink is provided by MSM coverage of Twiggy Forrest’s threat to launch a High Court constitutional challenge to the government’s mining tax legislation.  As Adele Ferguson breathlessly informed us in the Fairfax press:

The Gillard government’s credibility is about to take another battering as one of its more complex and ad hoc tax reforms – the minerals and resources rent tax – faces the threat of a constitutional challenge in the High Court.

But why would the government’s “credibility” take a battering merely because a disgruntled businessman takes a case to court?  Just about every law ever passed by Parliament creates winners and losers, and the losers frequently take it to court if they have enough money.  Forrest’s antics would only pose a threat to the government’s “credibility” if credible legal analysis suggested that a legal challenge had a significant prospect of success.  But Ferguson made no effort to obtain any expert commentary on that question.  Nor did the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann on last night’s 7:30, although at least his questioning of Forrest was less credulous than Ferguson’s frankly silly article.

In fact Twiggy’s own utterances on the supposed constitutional question have been just as silly as Ferguson’s article to the point of being almost incoherent:

(Continued)

Traditional Culture and the Wellbeing of Indigenous Australians: An analysis of the 2008 NATSISS (pdf)

Dr A.M. Dockery
Centre for Labour Market Research, Curtin University

Research based on data from the 2002 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey found evidence of a positive link between Indigenous Australians’ attachment to their traditional culture and a range of mainstream socio-economic indicators, contrary to the common assumption that traditional culture is a barrier to achievement. This paper uses data from the 2008 NATSISS to further explore the concept of ‘cultural attachment’, breaking it down into four constituent elements: participation in cultural events and activities, cultural identity, language and participation in traditional economic activities. The positive effects of cultural attachment on mainstream socio-economic indicators are confirmed, and now found to extend to subjective wellbeing. This is important as subjective measures of wellbeing are based on Indigenous peoples’ own values and preferences. Indigenous Australians who identify more strongly with their traditional culture are happier and display better mental health, but at the same time experience more psychological stress due to stronger feelings of discrimination. The findings suggest that traditional cultures should be preserved and strengthened as a means to both improving the wellbeing of Indigenous Australians and to ‘closing the gap’ on mainstream socio-economic indicators.