Fishing in the Bay

The Miles Franklin literary award is an annual literary prize given to fiction describing Australian stories. It is the most prestigious award of its kind, and has grown in importance since it began in 1957.

In 2009, the short list of five was all male. This event was widely referred to as the “sausage fest.” In response to the perceived gender bias suggested by this result, the female only Stella Awards were created as a response (by editor Aviva Tuffield and author Sophie Cunnigham).

The latest Miles Franklin award short list contains three females and no males. No pejorative “fest” term has described it as yet. And nor should it, unless one believes that there has been some intrinsic bias in the selection process. Is a result of either zero or five males from five (nominally a 1 in32 shot) evidence of gender bias?

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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 »

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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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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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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A Neilsen poll on religion and faith shows that most Australians believe in God or a similar universal spirit, but a majority also believe in miracles, heaven, life after death and angels. Read the rest of this entry »