Irreducible Complexity

For those of my friends (a couple at least) who believe that the Intelligent Design proponents might "have a point" - I would like to take a moment to post this piece... it's from The SGU 5x5 (The Skeptics Guide To The Universe, 5 by 5).

I found it one of the best, succinct, refutations of the "Irreducible Complexity" argument that is often put forward by people who support the idea of Intelligent Design.



On the same subject, essentially - I also found this, shorter, piece on Teleology (the generic argument behind Intelligent Design), its history and the reasons for being skeptical of its implementation.

Basically, it efficiently outlines the argument against the idea behind Intelligent Design.



Nice work from the SGU team.

So, "what's the harm?" you might ask

I really quite like this...

I found an interesting web site, today - dedicated to answering the question: "What's The Harm?"

It's a soft argument, often used by people of, what I would call, a non-skeptical nature... to refute the general argument that any false claim (by proponents of drugs that don't work or procedures that do little good) should be tracked down and advertised as non-scientific and unproven.

"What's the harm?" they say. By this, presumably, they mean "if it doesn't do any harm, then there's no problem with allowing people to keep believing it works, whether it does or not".

Now, besides the fact that I would disagree with this basic argument, on principal (more about that some other time, maybe)... even accepting the argument as a valid moral position - the truth of the matter is that many ineffective drugs, non-scientific procedures and false claims do do harm. I have heard many such examples over the years, usually while watching interesting talks from well known skeptics such as James Randi and Simon Singh (who won his libel case today - yay!).

The problem is, I always forget the details, and can't draw them up from my memory banks in a convincing enough way, when presented with the need to do so in argument...

And here's the answer: a web site devoted to recording, documenting and measuring the harm done by fallacious claims and bad (or non-existent) science.

What's The Harm

So bookmark it... and the next time someone says to you "but what's the harm" pull out your smartphone (no product bias here, thanks), load up this page - follow the link to the topic of the hour, and read out a few examples...

If the person you're talking with doesn't become violent with rage over what a smartypants you are, you might just have managed to make a well deserved point...

Have a quick browse through some of the topics covered. I found it quite interesting to see how much detail, and how many examples they've managed to collect.

Simon Singh wins libel case

The British Chiropractic Association, today, dropped its libel case against Simon Singh, the science writer.

In what must be a great relief to many active and outspoken skeptics, across the UK, and around the world - the court of appeal in the UK overturned the previous judgment, that Singh's piece was "not comment"... that he would need to prove the objective truth of what he wrote.

Interestingly, the previous judgment basically said "you need to prove that Chiropractic doesn't work, or we can sue you for saying it"... which of course would lead to all sorts of possible libel cases regarding people speaking our against unproven claims.

Imagine if pharmaceutical companies could say "'this product cures cancer' - and we can claim it does, on the bottle AND you can't print a word saying it doesn't, until you can prove that it doesn't". The onus of proof would then be on the consumer, or the skeptic, to prove the non-efficacy of a product before anyone would be allowed to say it didn't work.

Anyway, the point is, the decision was overturned - and the BCA have dropped their case.

As Rebecca Watson from Skepchick points out, though, Simon Singh may have a hell of time recouping his costs - and he may still have made some significant financial sacrifices in order to see this case through, and not simply settle "out of court".

More links on the story:
Telegraph UK
Times Online


[Ed: Latest update. This from "The Millenium Project" - Simon Singh again]

Sarah Mahew - grab on to what is true

I was quite excited (and, kind of touched) by this video:



But, I am confused as to what "Nokia Responsiveness" is.

I'm happy to see the inclusion of this story here - but what exactly is the point of Nokia Responsiveness and its attempt at civic "conversation starting"? Can anyone enlighten me?

But - actually, just replay the video... and listen to that inspiring question at the end... "do we have the courage to let go of our beliefs in order to grab on to what is true?"

Conroy already filtering his own site

Would I sound paranoid if I said Stephen Conroy's website is deliberately concealing users' searches for "ISP Filtering"?

Well the evidence is on the page itself:

//Customise the tag-cloud to display what shows up
if (unique[i] == "ISP Filtering")
{
continue;
}

Basically, this piece of code simply says "if the value in the List you are displaying is 'ISP Filtering' leave it out". It's there in plain code, in the HTML of the page you download from his site. However many searches anyone makes on "ISP Filetering" it will never be displayed in the list of users' searches - therefore giving a false impression of what people are actually searching for.

It claims to give you information on what users are interested in then specifically alters that information for, what can only been assumed to be, Senator Conroy's own purposes.

It is also a very blunt solution that obviously wouldn't catch values such as "Web Filtering" or "ISP Censorship". Not only is it surprising behaviour - it's also an ineffective, amateurish and clumsy solution to a problem (that he shouldn't have been trying to solve in the first place).

The worst thing about this is - if Senator Conroy doesn't understand what the difference between this and properly removing the results (on the server side) is, then he is an embarrassment to his portfolio and doesn't deserve the role... if he does understand the difference and can't be bothered fixing it "properly" (so you and I can't simply see it ourselves) then he simply doesn't think this is an embarrassing thing to do.

I think the former is more likely - but either way - he just doesn't get it.

More details - news.com.au article on the subject.

Budget '09 Roundup

Every year my best friend (who shall be, from here on, referred to as "C4") and I get together for a special event. One year, as there was no television at my house, he drove a television over to my house, in the car, especially.

No it's not the State Origin, or the World Cup (der, obviously - that's on every 4 years... isn't it?).

It's the budget. That's right, we get together... to watch... the budget.

As the major and most publicly anticipated political event of each year - we both find an embarrassed nerdy pleasure in making the time to watch it.

The main frustration in previous years has been wanting to comment in the middle of the speech - and rewind in order to catch details. This year (along with the beer, wine and cashews) I came to the party armed with note-pad and pen, so I could jot down points of interest without interrupting the flow of the speech. I needn't have bothered, however, as, low and behold, this year C4 brought his DVD recording system to the party so we could pause, discuss and rewind - what a revelation! Someone should tell someone... I don't know... maybe, sports fans, or something, might like this kind of thing too.

Every year I am inspired to write a roundup. So this year...

On top of this, however - C4 was kind enough to point out the discrepancy between the name of my blog and the regularity with which it's updated... perhaps my "ramblings" have not been quite as "incessant" as I would have hoped...

What better time to pick up the pace with my posts again!

So now, for the roundup:


The Roundup


Initial Thoughts

So - once you get past the contemporary need for a "catch phrase" or a sound bite:

"and tonight's budget is brought to you by the expression 'Nation Building for Recovery'"

the first issue with this budget is the fact that it was billed as a "tough budget". In his opening preamble, Wayne Swan says that "economic leadership is about making the tough decisions, no matter what the political consequences might be".

That may be so - but if it is, then this budget does nothing to prove Labor's commitment to economic leadership. Quite the opposite - they have obviously made some less "tough" decisions in order to minimise the political consequences in their most contested constituencies, and other "tough" decisions have been made precisely because there were no political consequences to speak of.

Yes of course - expecting politicians not to be political is like [insert drole comparison of two oxymoronic concepts here]. But still, to claim the actual decisions within this budget as anything approaching "tough" is simply taking the piss. Wayne Swan claimed that "We couldn't raise the pension without hard choices elsewhere" - but apparently... he has.


Pension Payments

• Increase in withdrawal rate
• Increase in qualifying age
• Decrease in super concessions (some temporary)
  

for pensioners; all of these things are savings. But they could hardly be defined as "tough" or "hard choices". All of them are outweighed by increased payments to singles and couples.

Now, don't get me wrong. I support all of these measures. All of them seem fair and right. Or, at least, more fair than the previous system. But none of them should be defined as "tough".


Paid Maternity Leave

All this talk brings me to one of major problems in this budget - the plans for paid maternity leave.

Let's look at some of the big numbers:

• $22 billion - Infrastructure
• $4.7 billion towards a $43 billion PPP Broadband Network
• $5.3 billion - Tertiary Education

Amongst all of this, the government has made one of their "tough" decisions regarding paid maternity leave and postponed it for 18 months.

Now the TOTAL spend over 5 years for the introduction of a Paid Parental Leave system is $731 million - and yet the government sees the need to postpone this until after the next election.

The savings are minimal, and yet the potential cultural benefit so great.

Lets make this clear - we are in a club of 2 (along with the US) as the ONLY OECD countries who have no paid maternity leave. If they were worried about the effect on job security, in a time of economic downturn - they could have found a little extra ($731 million isn't much compared to the rest of the budget) to compensate (small?) businesses for some of the extra costs involved in back-filling staff.

The last thing we want to encourage people to do right now, is to hold off on having more children - and yet that's what this decision does. It's a small price for a great gain - and there's no reason, in my mind, to hold a carrot to the electorate and say "vote for me again - or you might not get paid maternity". In fact I find that insulting.

Does the Rudd government believe in it as a policy or not? Not enough to introduce it - apparently.

You could imagine that this might push some of the Labor faithful towards voting Green... and amazingly enough, this shift is borne out in the latest poles - where Labor have lost 5 or 6 points, and the majority of them have been picked up by the Greens.

"But wait", I hear you cry, "didn't you say the problem was the budget isn't tough enough? Isn't that at least a small saving for tough times?"

And this brings me to to my comment for the budget as a whole.


The Big Problem

The problem with this budget is not the fact that it isn't a tough budget.

The problem for this budget is that it was sold as a tough budget.

In trying to come up with some good "tough" measures that the government could have introduced at this budget - I came up with nothing.

The problem is, anything broad-based enough, tough enough and big enough in total value, to actually be defined as "tough" is, at the same time, dangerously deflationary. And deflation isn't a game we want to risk getting into in this climate.

The truth of the matter is, we missed the opportunity to save as much money as we should have, under the last government. They gave it all back in tax cuts, which were an inflationary measure in boom times. Now we're stuck trying to avoid deflationary cuts in bad times.

It's much like the frustration with the first Swan budget.

There wasn't actually enough difference between the Rudd government's position and the Howard government's. While still in boom times, the Rudd government handed back most of the boom time money in personal tax cuts (only slightly less tax cuts than the Liberals wanted to introduce - but let's take a moment to imagine how much worse the current budget would look if we had introduced the Liberals tax cuts).

So... the problem isn't that this budget isn't tough enough - on the contrary... we need to admit that, what we don't need right now is a tough budget. We need to support spending in key areas - in order to avoid deflationary pressures. And we need to (which this budget does) plan to pull back on that accelerator once things are looking good again.

I actually support much of what this budget puts in motion.

After a period of short-term injections, we now need some medium-term plans to increase productivity and support jobs.

There's money for Health and Education and some areas of Social Security (interestingly not Unemployment or Single Parents).

But - in holding off on introducing the Paid Maternity Leave measures until after the next election, the Rudd government has snubbed its nose at its heart-land voters. The argument, presumably, is "well, who else are they going to vote for?".

The Greens? Well, again, Labor may be hoping that all those votes will come back to them in preferences. And they may well be correct.

But - after years of barracking for Kevin Rudd, in response to this (and his last) budget - my current hope for the next election is that we can find dense enough collections of "Left swinging" voters to make a real splash for the Greens.

For some reason (call me naive), I still believe the Greens will push through policies that represent their core constituencies, and not just the people who might be swayed at election time.

This wasn't an "election budget" - that's coming next time. Rudd will have to do a lot more "voter pleasing" next year. This was his opportunity to introduce some real and valuable "Labor style" policies - and, from my perspective, he missed it. I understand that you need to stay in power - but if you don't take the opportunity to introduce some strong policies when the opportunity is there, what's the point in being in power at all?

Unless of course, he thinks this is an election budget? Just how much does he predict we might be heading for a double dissolution...? Hmmmm...


References:

• Transcript of the 2009-10 Federal Budget, second reading

Phony Pope Mobile Fined

It's been a little while since I posted on offbeat news... well, it's been a little while since I posted on anything. I will be back to the political affairs soon - but in the mean time.

A protest Popemobile, built by Sydney activists as a protest against the Pope's visit in July, was issued with a Defect Notice and put off the road. It's driver, Ian Bryce was booked and fined for "having a roof ornament likely to distract motorists".

Details of its adventures, photos, and a video, are linked from the website worldTRUTHday.org.

On top of this, in related news, we now learn that the Government's bill for World Youth Day has come in at more than $100 million over-budget.