Fishing in the Bay

There has been recent discussion in the MSM and blogosphere about the relative merits of the Melbourne model compared to more traditional alternatives. There has been a provocative article by Steven King saying thanks very much Melbourne for sending us so many of your best and brightest. There was a rebuttal by Glyn Davis saying that what Melbourne lose in under-graduate enrolments they more than make up for in specialist masters students, and that this was always the intention. There is a placatory article by Monash VC Ed Byrne. I added a comment to his article which got blown up into an Australian article so I guess I won’t apply for a job at Monash any time soon**.

There are a couple of nice discussion of the issues (including comments) by Professor Paul Fritjers  (here and here) which you might like to look at. I thought it might be worth while putting my thoughts down here, in a more complete manner than is possible within a blog comment.

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Here is a good news story about an academic journal that is prepared to set the record straight.

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The ARC spend around m$300 per year, receive 4000 applications and fund around 1000 of them for an average k$300 per year each. The success rate is around 23%. On Nov 3 this year, they posted a “consultation document” (HERE) outlining what appear to be some pretty major changes to the Discovery scheme. If my understanding of this document is correct, the proposed changes are ill-conceived. They divert money to poorer projects, create perverse incentives and manifestly fail to solve the main problem that the ARC claim to be worried about. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week on ABC insiders, the discussion briefly turned to population policy and its role in the previous election. Kerry-Ann Walsh (former Herald-Sun journalist, now semi-retired and occasional opinion writer for Fairfax) chimed in with

Given what Australia’s needs are going into the future…and the fact that the fertility rate is so low, we will just disappear if we don’t have a healthy immigration level.

And the fact that both sides were blathering during the election campaign and trying to hoodwink the Australian people is a disgrace.

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Mathematics is a fairly formal business. But those who ‘get it’ realise that there is meaning behind the formalism, that it is not a matter of just shunting symbols around for its own sake. Terence Tao is not just a walking talking Mathematica program. Unfortunately, math teaching at one of the most prestigious schools in Melbourne are turning Maths into a silly test of whether you can follow instructions to the letter. Here are some examples from a recent Math Methods SAT* marking scheme.

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A recent article in the Age pointed out that Melbourne’s dams are approaching 50% capacity for the first time in 4 years.  They included a time series of % storage for the past 40 years which tells the whole story pretty well, placing the last four years of drought in context, as well as the recent rains. Unfortunately, they added a statistical summary which, in my opinion, ranks with the worst ever*. Read the rest of this entry »

(This post is based on the Belz lecture I gave on October 14th. The slides are HERE. The most important part of this post is the last section. I would be very grateful to have some ideas on the questions I pose there.)

There are plenty of public intellectuals that are prominent in commenting on issues that directly inform public policy. The best known are probably Tim Flannery and Peter Singer. Another is Ross Garnaut who is routinely asked for comment on any issues that relate to climate change and resource rent taxes. Historians Henry Reynolds, Keith Windshuttle and Robert Manne are well-known for their internecine battles that have become milestones in the so-called history wars. Andrew Leigh (now the federal member for Fraser) and Joshue Gans are economist who write opinion pieces or appear on ABC radio on a weekly basis. There is not a single academic statistician or data analysts that contributes regularly to public debate. Why?

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Science News is a respectable magazine in the mould of New Scientist. So I was surprised to be pointed to a recent article by Tom Siegfried which comes close to blaming all the world’s woes on…we humble statisticians. I suggest that you read the article from beginning to end before returning to my comments.

It is easy to be defensive when statistics is polemically described as

a mutant form of math that has deflected science’s heart from the modes of calculation that had long served so faithfully. Science was seduced by statistics, the math rooted in the same principles that guarantee profits for Las Vegas casinos

and I will not disappoint! But ultimately a better response is to understand how others view and misinterpret statistics and sketch out an appropriate response.

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I recently came upon a piece in Slate Magazine by Steve Landsburg describing a very nice price of research. It concerns the financial costs to women of having childern. I thought this article (reproduced below the fold) might provide a nice class room example.

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Few statistics are more oft-quoted by empirical researchers than r-squared. While applauding the value of an intuitive interpretation in principle, it is pretty clear that the interpretation is wrong. Apart from honesty, the main reason I care about this is that it gets me into trouble with (the more discerning) students.

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