I had my first beach trip of the season yesterday while I was waiting for the Poverty Expo at UNSW to start. It was well cold, but still good.
I met up with Jo, David and Emily (and bumped into Laurice and her bud) at the Poverty Expo. Except it wasn't an expo. It was a serial presentation about the kinds of the development that make me want to be a programmer.
With only a couple of exceptions, career days only seem to make me less interested in the jobs people are advertising.
I find this a bit sad. It's definitely encouraging that women are getting better wages. But men are earning the same real wage they were back in 1979.
It's possible that, in the past, the wage bias against women actually resulted in a wage subsidy to men. They received some of the surplus value that women generated. In this picture then, what gains men achieved in productivity were shifted to women who were able to take home a larger proportion of the value they created.
Given that wage inequality has increased the way it has over this period, I suspect there is more to the story.
It's also possible there never was a wage bias and this is just capturing changes in the way and amount women work. But it's unlikely, and certainly isn't the kind of thing you should say in company.
Miles, Laurence and I went to The Basics on Friday night. The rocked good. We'd never heard them really. The support bands were pretty alright but hadn't raised our expectations. So when they came on and blew us away we were really blown away. As a live gig they whooped Gotye's arse big time. And to top it all awesomely off, the tickets were only $16 tiny dollars.
Since riding home last night, after chugging down some delicious, not inappropriately priced Belgian beer with David, I have discovered some things:
I did, however, manage to make it home.
I was woken up this morning by a sparrow flying in my window and falling into a bundle of clothes by my head. He flew around, struggling to find his way back to the window before settling on my NI poster for a rest. After a bit more searching, a little time hiding on the floor behind the desk and another break sitting on my Amelie poster, I managed to pick him up and find him the window.
Large shopping centres, elevators and the dominance of the car are driving Australia's obesity epidemic, an Australian report has found.
I would have thought that, in terms of reducing weight, large shopping centres would better than small shopping centres. The article is on SMH and is called City slickers are the new city thickers. I won't link to it because smug obesity puns make me cross, and I don't want to encourage that sort of behaviour.
I love the Greens. Who else would spend as much energy as them chasing the TPV refugee vote? Probably Australia's smallest constituency and also, technically, ineligible to vote.
The dotted line is the 1972 border negotiated with Indonesia. The black line is the equidistant line between the two nations, which East Timor argues is based on international law.
This is from a letter "leaked" to Wikileaks, from Ramiro V. Paz to Mari Alkatiri.
I'm inclined to think the East Timorese have a fair point. But then I am a rabid pinko, so I would say that.
I suppose it's not especially surprising to find Australia bullying small, newly independent nations into maintaining agreements made under colonialism. Even less surprising that Australia supported the Indonesian occupation for as long as they could.
Bob Brown leaves those other fellas for dead.
I find it a little amusing that the HSC question "Discuss, using examples, the impact of government legislation on employees" is labelled a "slur" against by the Liberal party. Surely, that question gives students an opportunity to talk about how much employees have benefited from the opportunities and freedom provided to them by Workchoices.
Perhaps it's just the thought of young people discussing politics that upsets Liberals.
I don't know much about abortion pills at all. But while I was lying in bed this morning it struck me that you might be able to spike someone's drink with an abortion pill. Or partners might be able to slip it into your food. I can't think of a reason why someone would spike your drink with it, but I can think of reasons why partners might spike your food.
My left arm has got pretty brown in the last month or so. Browner than my right arm for sure. My theory is that because I ride to university in the mornings and I have to go south, my left side gets more sun than my right. I wonder if other cyclists have the same problem. Over time you could end up looking quite ridiculous.
Bob Dylan is pretty much the best poem-writer in the world. When he's not writing lyrics he's more open and you get a better sense of how brilliant he actually is.
Recently, [UN peacekeepers] initiated what they call “night flashes,” in which three truckloads of peacekeepers drive into the bush and keep their headlights on all night as a signal to both civilians and armed groups that the peacekeepers are there. Sometimes, when morning comes, 3,000 villagers are curled up on the ground around them.
I read a paper last week which attempted to find out what aspects of a visit to their GP were most important to them. It was a discrete choice experiment and one of the attributes related to the trustworthiness of the doctor. There were two possible levels of the attribute:
The conclusion of the paper was that having a trustworthy doctor was the most important issue for people.
We did Martin's tax. He is going to get a $3 tax return. He is pretty angry and screaming a little bit.
Mohamed Haneef should never have been charged, the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions admitted last night.
We got it wrong on Haneef: DPP chief
Days of front page terrorism accusations, effectively countered by 5 inches on page 11. Good job Sydney Morning Herald. I think your work here is done.
Prime Minister John Howard visited Government House in Canberra this morning to ask permission to call the federal election, ending months of phoney campaigning.
Are the SMH editors asleep? I may happen to agree with the statement, but even the most rabid Greens voters might hope for less bias than that.
In cooperation with the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Wizco Toys of Montclair, NJ, recalled 245,000 Aqua Assault RoboFighters Monday after three dumb kids managed to kill themselves playing with the popular toy, ruining the fun for everybody else.
John Howard is now suggesting that if we truly care about Indigenous reconciliation his party is the only option. WTF?
I rode home in 15 minutes yesterday. It was pretty quick. Now my legs are sore and I have urges to eat potato.
When governments and health organisations make decisions about how to spend money on health there are a number of things they consider. One of the main ones is how much it costs to save a life. Others often include the age or wealth of the group affected or the type of disease.
Some people (maybe social conservatives) tend to consider HIV as one of those diseases it's better to do nothing about, because the more you "solve" the problem the worse it gets. I think this is a bollocks argument, but I mostly think so because it treats humans as statistics. However, that's exactly what most health interventions do - particularly in poor countries.
Perhaps we assume no one wants to spend enough money to help everyone (which seems reasonable). We could, but we won't. So then if you're someone deciding how to spend that money, do you take into consideration the secondary impact of adding a year of life to a person with HIV. Assume you can spend $100 to add one year of life. In doing that, you might also create a 2% chance of that person infecting someone else with HIV and taking 20 years (or 30 or 40 years) from their life.
$100 = (12 months - 2% * 20 years) = 7 months of additional life
If you look at people as individuals this is obscene. Imagine the conversation in the clinic: "We would give you medicine to keep you alive sir, but we just don't trust you to use a condom." However, if you're considering people in aggregate and are willing to accept probabilistic relationships (such as the likelihood of additional infections) is it something you might do. I think the assumptions I've made about the numbers are sensible, and it's the kind of reasoning that people already use in health. The very fact that you have an epidemic from a disease with a five year life expectancy suggests that the average annual infection rate is probably higher than 2%.
You could take it further. If you treat people based on their statistical likelihood of surviving do you treat people based on their statistical likelihood of having unprotected sex? We already use statistics to decide who gets heart transplants for instance.
I have to read about a whole lot of stuff like this that makes me feel uncomfortable. I'm not sure, though, that I'm willing to abandon the idea of identifying trade-offs in health care spending. You'd think that an ad hoc system must result in a worse outcome than a system where the trade-offs are made explicit. Although since the whole issue is trying to work out what a "worse outcome" actually means, perhaps you can't even say that much.
Balad Airbase, Iraq (Google Maps)
The Reaping was crap. Bad special effects and the dumbest plot since the Teletubbies. Hilary Swank sure is good looking, but that was all it had going for it.
I have spent a bit of thought trying to work out the best way of rating my iTunes music. Most of it I haven't rated, or have rated only by album. It's mostly an academic question, because there isn't much you can actually do with the ratings once you've stuck them in.
At first I found myself rating everything as three stars or more. I thought, if it's rated less than three then why not just delete it. Those were times of precious disk space for me, but it does make sense in general. Scrolling through a whole lot of junk music is a pain, even if you've got endless disk space. Not mention that obsessives like me obtain a great deal of satisfaction from having a neat music collection, with all the ID3 tags in good working order.
So I thought I need to reinterpret the ratings. Normally one star means something is shite. In my case I wanted one star to mean "just good enough not to get deleted". So I started doing that. And it worked pretty well. Most of my playlists drop stuff with one star, but the music is still there if I want to listen to it - which occasionally I do.
I also thought about the top rating - five stars. Should I keep it reserved for only the best, life-changing music? Should I assume that music goodness is uniform and give five stars to 20% of the collection? Or is it some sort of normal distribution (or something non-symmetric but similar)? Tough questions I know. Should I worry about trying to make my ratings comparable to other people's ratings. What about rating inflation? Will I one day need a 6th star? And when I'm in a good mood I'm likely to give everything good ratings. I find that every time I really enjoy a song I end up giving it four stars because giving it five makes me feel like a rating floozy, and giving it three just feels mean. I suspect there's a decided spike at four, and this troubles me.
Another problem is that I never take the effort to rate anything that I don't like. So everything has four stars or no rating at all. Which is totally useless. I've started bulk rating whole albums, hoping that over time I'd use some Bayesian logic to gradually make each song rating more appropriate. I did this just to get some data in there but it isn't very satisfying.
I'm inclined to think that I should maintain some sort of histogram and try to ensure that the ratings distribution sticks to something reasonable. Perhaps just a uniformish distribution. Hopefully, I'll subconsciously adjust my ratings based on short-term distortions in distribution over the long-term it stays reasonable.
Clearly, plenty more thought needs to be done on this. Although I can't help but wonder if my life would be better if I completely removed the whole rating column from iTunes altogether.
Liberal
Peter Costello: I think it was a very strange time for the Labor Party, to come in support of the Bali bombers.
So official Liberal policy now is that we absolutely, undeniably, cross-our-fingers, do not love our enemies. It seems that Rudd has adopted this policy as his own and can't express enough support for it.
Labor
Describing himself as "hardline" when it came to terrorists, Mr Rudd said terrorists should be left to "rot in jail".
Kevin Rudd has criticised his own foreign affairs spokesman over a speech that indicated Labor's disapproval of death sentences for the Bali bombers, calling it "insensitive" and saying Labor would never support clemency for terrorists.
But then, perhaps this is just the nature of the Australian people. I want to live somewhere else.
The age old question of whether you can smell while you're asleep has been answered. This morning, for the first time ever, I was actually woken up by the smell of poo.
Human beings sure suck balls. Robert McLelland had to apologise to "victims of the Bali bombings" for suggesting that the Bali bombers shouldn't be executed. He made a speech about how Labor opposed the death penalty anywhere.
A wedge though it may be, I agree with what John Howard said:
He's absolutely humiliated a decent bloke for what? Articulating his policy.
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