Dave’s Archives

People like me should never, ever be told about parliamentary RSS feeds. Unfortunately, I found out anyway, and soon after discovered a report from last week entitled Plebiscite for an Australian Republic Bill 2008 (tabled by the enchantingly-named Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee).

Briefly, the proposal is to hold a plebiscite on whether Australia should become a republic - a simple yes/no question not connected with any specific republic model. Should the response be affirmative, a second plebiscite would then determine a particular model, and a subsequent referendum would finalise the deal.

I've posted previously on the subject of such plebiscites. Professor David Flint  returned to bestow his special brand of wisdom on the committee:

4.9        Professor David Flint, National Convenor of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy,  held the view that a plebiscite would create 'constitutional instability':

Not only unwise; it is irresponsible, because it invites a vote of no confidence in the existing system. It creates periods of constitutional instability where we do not know where we are and then leads to nothing.

I quote Flint (or at least the committee's interpretation of Flint's comments) only for my own amusement, because his arguments are so comically and transparently vacuous. My real purpose here is to look at the committee's recommendations. Most of the report deals with the arguments for and against holding a plebiscite on whether Australia should become a republic. So what did they conclude?

Recommendation 1

6.5       The committee recommends the establishment of an ongoing public awareness campaign on Australia's constitutional system which engages as wide a range of the public as possible.

Recommendation 2

6.7       The committee recommends that if any further process advocating constitutional change is undertaken, including that of a republic, it seek to encourage Australians to engage meaningfully in the debate.

Observe the most skillfully-crafted of non-answers - a compromise position that involves no actual compromise. An information campaign and public debate is something we can all agree on, right? Well yes, but if that's all we can agree on then we're not making an awful lot of progress.

Senator Bob Brown goes on the offensive in the Additional Comments section of the report:

The Labor government supports an Australian republic, but not yet.

So, to avoid embarrassment, the committee has declined to make any recommendations and declined to acknowledge that I was the senator who introduced the Bill.

And that's how the sausage is made.

I'm beginning to think I should have approached this maths modelling stuff from an engineering point of view: with a requirements document, version control and unit testing. Constructing a reasonably complicated mathematical model seems to have enough in common with software development that such things could be quite useful.

I'm calling this "meta-engineering", because I'd be engineering the development of a model which itself describes (part of) the software engineering process.

The only problem is that formal maths notation can't just be compiled and executed like source code, and source code is far too verbose (and lacking in variety of symbols) to give you a decent view of the maths.

Fortunately, Bayesian networks provide a kind of high-level design notation; perhaps the UML of probability analysis. Mine look like some sort of demented public transport system. However, drawing them in LaTeX using TikZ/PGF gives me a warm fuzzy feeling.

Over the past few weeks I've had numerous questions of the form: "how's your work going?" I find I can only ever answer this with banalities like "good" or "meh".

It's not that I don't know what I'm doing. At any given point in time, I have a list of minor challenges written up on the whiteboard (which accumulate with monotonous regularity). However, my first problem is that I never remember what these are when I'm not actually working on them. I write them down so that I don't have to remember, of course.

My second problem is that, even if I did remember what I was supposed to be doing, there just isn't any short explanation. Currently I have on the whiteboard such startling conversation pieces as "Express C_I in terms of S and U". This may or may not tickle your curiosity (depending on how much of a nerd you are), but explaining what it means - and granted, I'll have to do that eventually anyway - demands as much mental energy as solving the problem itself.

My third problem is  that I regularly shuffle around the meaning of the letters, to ensure I don't run out of them and also to resolve inconsistencies. I'm currently using the entire English alphabet in my equations and a large proportion of the Greek one, so naming variables is a minor headache in itself. For instance, since I wrote the todo item "Express C_I in terms of S and U", I've decided to rename the variable "C_I" to "C_S". Also, "S" used to be "T", and "U" used to be two separate variables. This is mostly cosmetic, but I recoil at the prospect of explaining something so obviously in flux.

I choose to believe that I'll be able to explain everything once I've written my thesis... and hopefully as I'm writing my thesis.

From our adorably naïve Family First Senator, via the ABC:

When I put forward the question 'isn't it true that carbon emissions have been going up and global temperature hasn't?', they wanted to rephrase my question and not answer it.

Of course they did you fool - it's a loaded question. Technically the answer is "yes", but that has nothing to do with the validity of climate change. If you'd wanted a straight answer you'd have asked a question related to climate (e.g. regarding the global temperature trend) and not merely weather.

There's some irony in the ABC's use of the phrase "fact finding mission" to describe what Fielding was doing in the US. He was at the Heartland Institute's so-called "International Conference on Climate Change", which, considering the denialist preconceptions that pervade the website, might not be the first place you would think to look for actual facts. Unless, of course, you're an elected member of parliament.

...behind that sofa.

Either that, or it's the evolutionary process at work in the Swan River.

I found this somewhat random piece of work (sung to the tune of Bette Midler's From A Distance) while digging through my hard drive. I did have to change "John" to "Rudd" though.

From a distance the campus looks green and orange,
and the concrete buildings grey.
From a distance OASIS meets the screen,
and the grant cash has been paid.

From a distance, there is harmony,
and it echoes through the labs.
It's advice of hope, it's advice of peace,
lecture notes in browser tabs.

From a distance we all have enough,
and no one hates the dean.
And there are no scales, no fails, and sound degrees,
no paying customers to please.

From a distance we are researchers
writing worldly documents.
Giving talks on hope, giving talks on peace,
They're the talks of common sense.
Rudd is watching us. Rudd is watching us.
Rudd is watching us from a distance.

From a distance you look like my friend,
though you've plagarised before.
From a distance I just cannot comprehend
what all these meetings are for.

From a distance there is harmony,
and it echoes through the labs.
And it's the test of hope, it's the test of love,
it's the students' study plan.

It's the hope of hopes, it's the love of loves.
They are all basically human.
And Rudd is watching us, Rudd is watching us,
Rudd is watching us from a distance.
Oh, Rudd is watching us, Rudd is watching.
Rudd is watching us from a distance.

Normally unseen by the small number of real live humans who visit this blog, I get a steady stream of comment spam. None of it makes it through, most being caught by a set of fairly simple filter rules, and the rest being swiftly cut down by a heartless moderator (i.e. me).

Recent comment spammers have become a little smarter. Instead of blasting away with meaningless comments containing dozens of links to automatically-generated URLs, it seems they're now trying a sort of social engineering. They post flattering comments with no embedded links at all, possibly hoping that if a single comment gets through from a given email address, they will have free reign to post anything from that same address (taking advantage of an option in WordPress).

This is fairly easy to spot, because such comments are still completely generic and contain no hint that the commenter has understood anything I've written. In particular, in response to my irreverent post on the H1N1 flu, one "person" had the following contribution to make:

Hi, Congratulations to the site owner for this marvelous work you’ve done. It has lots of useful and interesting data.

Well, it was a truly important piece of research, after all, so I'm happy to take the credit for it.

According to the WHO, Australia is now coming fifth in diagnosed H1N1 cases, behind the US, Mexico, Canada and Japan. We started off slow, but I reckon we can take 'em. Come on!

*cough*

Update (June 5th): we've knocked off Japan to take fourth place! As of update 43, the WHO has us at 501 vs. 385. We're closing in on Canada as well (1530). Unfortunately, the WHO's scoreboard lags behind reporting within Australia. According to the Health Minister of the Australian team, we're up to 878. However, Mexico and the US seem to have the silver and gold in the bag, with impressive WHO scores of 5029 and 10053 respectively.

Tony Abbott - Mr People Skills himself - is on-message, describing the Rudd government's use of the phrase "temporary deficit" as "Orwellian", on Insiders this morning and elsewhere. One may surmise that Abbott, being entirely honest and reasonable, fears the rise of absolute tyranny and the end of all forms of freedom, with human dignity forever trampled beneath the jackboots of Rudd's front bench. This all begins with the bone-chilling use of political spin by the government, something Abbott would never have contemplated in his entire political career. Nineteen Eighty-Four is indeed right around the corner. And you thought it was just a budget deficit brought on by a recession!

The impending annihilation of liberty aside, Abbott has an intensely irritating manner of speech. He artificially pauses for a split-second every couple of words, as if he's trying to give the impression that he's actually thinking about what he's saying. It's irritating because it completely fails to cover up the sheer inanity of his rhetoric, and in doing so makes it even more inane. That said, I muted the TV after a few seconds, so I suppose it's not that much of a problem.

Apparently one of the world's foremost experts on global warming - as far as the denialist camp is concerned - is Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. The sum total of his qualifications appear to be his propensity to comment on the subject. A google search turned up the Heartland Institute's take on Monckton.

Observe the ad on the left of the page: "Why Does Gore Refuse To Debate His Critics? CLIMATE CHANGE IS NOT A CRISIS". It looks like something straight out of a political campaign, which ought to be enough to toss it aside without further contemplation. But let's contemplate for a second. The ad shows Al Gore's face above four people who - we presume - are "his critics" (one of whom is our esteemed Viscount Monckton). How much tomfoolery can you squeeze into something so small?

1. The one-versus-four theme makes Al Gore look like he's on his own, which couldn't be further from the truth.
2. The ad conjures up images of public debates of the sort that have nothing to do with science. One does not resolve anything, least of all matters of scientific enquiry and public policy, by having proponents of each view point stand up on a stage and hurl sound bites at each other.
3. If anyone did need to be involved in a debate, it would be the hundreds of scientists who contribute to the IPCC's reports, not Al Gore, who is after all just the messenger.

Science. We've heard of it.