Fishing in the Bay

Controversial economist Paul Fritjers is always a lively and thought provoking read. Recently at Club Troppo, he has posted on his top five economic reforms that make’ good economics in the sense of being in the interest of the long-run welfare of Australia.” One of them involves the ABS…. Read the rest of this entry »

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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(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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A common lament of the naughties is that we are drowning in data. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could swim instead of drown? I have recently become aware of a new data visualization tool called Pivot, developed by Microsoft Live Labs.

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On January 26, 2010 the Grattan Institute released a report (HERE) on measuring school performance. The main recommendation of the report is to replace measurement of average school performance with so-called value-added indices. The idea is very simple – to measure student progress as the primary outcome – and by employing an appropriate statistical model to extract that component of the improvement which can be attributed to the school.

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The article

G.M.Laslett, C.J.Lloyd and G.K.Robinson (1994)Encounters with statistical inference - an interview with Evan Williams. Australian Journal of Statistics, 36, 133-152. 

is HERE (about 2MB). Evan’s funeral will be held at St Luke’s Uniting Church, Barrabool Road, Highton on Wednesday (February 3) at 2.00 pm, prior to a private cremation.

Statistics features heavily in every psychology course. My son has just completed the rats and stats section of the course – and he vastly preferred the rats. Some psychology researchers, like Spearman, developed their own methods and have become household names in our field. But have statisticians influenced the field of psychology? We would certinaly hope so. The British Psychological Society agrees and have recently compiled an annotated list of the 10 statisticians (who were not psychologists) who have most influenced the field of psychology.** Read the rest of this entry »