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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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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(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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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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How do you detect election fraud? A recent article in the Washington Post describes a novel statistical idea. I wish I had thought of it.

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The graph below was provided by recent Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. It shows a geographic map of the swing from 2004 to 2008. Read the rest of this entry »

My colleague, Peter Cebon, has sent me the graphic below which shows a time series of temperature, CO2 and sea levels. It is actually a pretty good graphic. While it is true that one generally counsels against putting three plots, on different scales, on the same graph, I think that this one works pretty well, especially with the three axes at the right color coded to agree with the time series. The resolution is not that great so I suggest you download it in pdf form HERE.

On a recent ABC interview, a well known scientist made the following statement about global temperatures.

Actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.

Is she right?

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