Who knew that Adam and Eve didn’t use figleaves but a strategically placed lily pond? Perhaps I haven’t been reading Genesis literally enough.
Continue reading ‘Not exactly Aphrodite being born from the sea’
Archive for May, 2007
An inadvertent companion piece to Suzoz’ earlier find from New Scientist, A guide to the Perplexed on Climate Change, from Gristmill comes How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic.
a complete listing of the articles in “How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic,” a series by Coby Beck containing responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:
* Stages of Denial,
* Scientific Topics,
* Types of Argument, and
* Levels of Sophistication.
Sweet.
Via Ezra Klein. Amanda Marcotte feels the term “skeptic” is misused when talking about a cult of denialism.
There’s been a lot of press this last week about the reported breakthough in genome testing that will pinpoint clusters of imperfectly-copied genes that increase the risk of inheriting breast cancer. Much of the excitement is due to the fact that the technique can be equally well used in testing for other genetic combinations that increase the risk of developing cancers of all sorts, not just the breast tissue.
There’s no doubt that it is an exciting development indeed. There’s been plenty of hoopla, and the scientists who developed this will no doubt do very well from it, and so they should. However, I want to pinpoint one aspect that’s missing or at least glossed over in a lot of the coverage of the original Nature article detailing the new technique: inherited cancer vulnerability doesn’t explain most diagnosed cancers.
Contrast this fairly typical coverage from Business Weekly:
Two of the genetic regions they identified contain genes that are thought to increase breast cancer risk by about 20 per cent in women who carry one faulty copy of a gene and by between 40 and 60 per cent if they carry two faulty copies.
The lifetime risk for women who carry two faulty copies in either of these two genes would rise from one in 11 to around one in six or one in seven, respectively.
With this from Medical Laboratory World:
Breast cancer that is caused by inherited genetic faults is thought to account for around 5% to 10% of the 44,000 new cases diagnosed each year.
They’re both actually saying the same thing about the proportion of inherited gene factors leading to cancer, but one is using obfuscation to glide by it and the other is being clear about how inherited genetic faults are a minority of cancer cases.
Now obviously, if people with a genetic vulnerability know of it and are thus more aware of possible early symptoms and thus seek early treatment, this has the potential to save thousands of lives, or at least to prevent them from having to undergo radical surgery if their cancer can be treated less invasively and still be controlled. But what are the factors thought to be oncogenic amongst the 90-95% of breast cancer patients diagnosed each year who aren’t thought to have a particular genetic vulnerability?
With climate such an intensely discussed topic today, a fascinating Hindsight audio documentary about Goyder’s line.
George Goyder was the Surveyor-General of South Australia from 1861 until 1893. While he was involved in many things, Goyder is most famous for his analysis of the patterns of the South Australian climate, deriving a boundary within which the rains were reliable enough for wheat growing, while beyond they were too low and, equally importantly, not predictable enough.
Despite this, a sequence of good seasons in the 1870s saw his work ignored and wheat growers head out into the farthest northern regions of South Australia. Needless to say, the good seasons came to an end and whole communities were abandoned, leaving the desert regions of South Australia to the graziers and miners. The documentary discusses the religious aspects to the farmers’ optimism - the idea that “rain follows the plough” as a reward for effort seems to have been a popular one.
Foolhardy optimism about the Australian climate, in the face of the best scientific advice of the time, doesn’t exactly seem to be a new phenomenon.
There’s been some interesting discussion on this thread about Therese Rein’s business on the deeper problems surrounding the Job Network. One of them certainly is the very low rates of pay which are common in the employment services sector. There’s no doubt that the award for people working in that sector is vastly inadequate, and a business model which accepts very low wages (often around 30k for a full time position) and ties the capacity to earn in excess of the baseline pay rate to performance indicators which reinforce the perversities of the design of the job network rather than one which rewards skills and training is a legitimate point of criticism.
In comments, Stephen Hill linked to a report from Catholic Social Services Australia [pdf] which provides a critique of the current system. This paper has also been picked up on in a column in The Age by Ken Davidson, who points to one significant anomaly - the fact that funding is effectively denied to social service agencies, such as the Brotherhood of St Lawrence (who have withdrawn from the Job Network), which seek to do the hard work of actually providing the services necessary to address the needs of long term unemployed clients and other disadvantaged job seekers rather than the reward for minimal effort job placement incentives which the JN centres on.
There are two points worth making about the politics of this discussion.
Continue reading ‘The job network and conflicts of interest’
We will soon know what Prime Ministerial Task Group on Emissions Trading recommends. But we already know that Howard’s response to the report will be accompanied by a massive propaganda campaign to convince Australians that its non-action on climate change is really the evidence of leadership.
We know that the response is unlikely to inconvenience coal.
We know too that Howard will not take the European approach of setting long-term targets for deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.
Hence Dennis Shanahan was probably on the money, for once, when he suggested:
AUSTRALIA is developing a regional carbon emissions trading scheme that would include China and the US and could form the basis of a “Sydney declaration” at this year’s APEC summit.
I am somewhat aghast that Ayaan Hirsan Ali came to town and our old friend Pamela Bone failed to mention her in her column yesterday. Instead, local Eustonista Bone stuck to a Blairite standard - the wonders of liberal interventionism (soon to be rendered moot, no doubt, as Gordon Brown takes quite a different approach to foreign policy).
Still, the specture of Ali’s work is obviously never far from Bone’s horizon. Ali has been giving interviews in Australia:
“Islam was founded in an Arab desert culture,” she says. “The role that women had at that time in the 7th century was tribal in context. She was there only to reproduce. Women were viewed almost like camels, or perhaps, just as reproductive organs for the tribe.
Bone writes:
To many it is shockingly impolite to suggest that some countries - Western liberal democracies, for example - are better than countries that still operate under rules more appropriate to 7th-century century Arabia.
The biggest two arguments against liberal interventionism are that war is not necessarily a humanitarian intervention, and inevitably has dire consequences for many even if missions “succeed” and that the calls for humanitarian intervention to save people in the name of “universal values” (which are, as Bone concedes, actually Western) are invariably selective. Contrast for instance the current moves in regard to Darfur with the total indifference shown to the Congo where the UN has estimated four million civilian deaths. Writing in The Guardian, Roger Howard hits the nail on the head.
Ken over at Road to Surfdom has written another cracker of a post, looking at one of the key flaws in arguments for WorkChoices:
Most workers don’t regard their job as an economic transaction
This is where an economic model of the employment relationship falls down. It assumes that employers and workers are rational actors who are exchanging information about the value of a commodity called ‘labour’ in a market (or at least it assumes that’s what they’d do if only they were left to get on with it without the State interfering all the bloody time). In truth, while many managers might think of labour as a commodity, few workers do.
For most workers, work is primarily a social relationship. Sure they get paid for it but that’s only one part of a complex relationship. Our job says a lot about who we are - to family, the wider community and to ourselves. The idea that people make decisions about their jobs based solely on maximising the price they can get for their labour is self-evidently ridiculous to anyone who is capable of observing RealityWorld objectively instead of through an ideological prism.
That gets right to the heart of one of the key reasons why WorkChoices is unpopular, I think. It’s not necessarily that people are scrambling to join unions (though there’s significant evidence around that more workers have a favourable view of unions than not and more would be interested in joining one than are actually union members) or that every clause in an award is treated as sacrosanct. It’s that the justification of WorkChoices in terms of the economy doesn’t resonate. In fact, it suggests to people that they are going to be treated as commodified labour rather than as, well, people.
I blogged a few days ago about the recent Nandos pole-dancing ad which means that I won’t be eating their food. I’ve previously blogged on why Dolce and Gabbana and other businesses that use images of sexist and degrading attitudes to women in order to advertise their product won’t be getting my dollars.
Now a court case just decided in the US Supreme Court means that I won’t be buying GoodYear products either, as they discriminated against a female manager for years regarding pay relative to men of equal or lesser seniority performing the same work in the same position, as ruled by the EEOC.
That’s infuriating enough. The really outrageous aspect is that “strict-constructivist” Associate Justice Samuel Alito cast the deciding vote in dismissing her unarguable case of gender discrimination on a pure technicality: that she hadn’t filed a complaint against the initial pay discrimination event within 180 days. This is at the very least a tendentious reading of the statute:
Continue reading ‘So I cross another business off the OK to buy from list’
I’ve just noticed that the Australian Libertarian Society is running a poll on the best individual (of course) libertarian blogger.
At the time of writing (and who knows when the poll will be closed?) there are three contenders at the front of the pack running neck and neck - Andrew Norton on 23%, and Pommygranate and A Better World: Graeme Bird for High Office on 22%.
To showcase these competitors, and highlight the undoubted quality of individual Australian libertarian thought, I’ve taken the liberty of sampling from their recent posts. Over the fold.
It’s almost the end of the month. So, time again to condemn. Here’s an eleventh open condemnation thread. What’s getting up your goat this week? Which evil political, cultural, social and religious phenomena need condemnation?
You can condemn anything except If the Dead Could Speak. But you can condemn SBS for sucking me in half way through by claiming that it was “from the makers of the Sopranos” or something similar when the only parallel was that it was a HBO series - and now I’ve missed much of the back story whereas I would have been blissfully ignorant had it not been for such misleading advertising!
Continue reading ‘I won’t add my condemn to your condemn XI’
Andrew Norton has an interesting post up on the successful move by Collingwood gay pub The Peel to apply for an administrative exemption from anti-discrimination laws so as to keep out str8 people and lesbians.
I can understand that bucks and hens’ nights might not go down too well with the vibe of a gay pub, but I was a bit gobsmacked to read the owner’s justification that dykes playing pool frightened some of the gay bois. There’s a lot to sort out here in terms of issues, but I do think that the separatism that may or may not be part of the environing non-str8 culture in Melbourne (I don’t know, so pardon me if the assumption is wrong) is generally something with which I’m unsympathetic. Certainly a number of venues in Brisbane (not at all limited to licensed premises but including cafes and retail shops) in and around the Valley have put a fair bit of effort in since the mid 90s into establishing queer friendly spaces which are also inclusivist - not least because the assumption is that recognition and respect will lead to better attitudes all round and also minimise verbal and physical abuse of same-sex attracted folks. And I venture to suggest the owner’s claim, reinforced by the tribunal, that lesbians have many other venues in which to “express intimacy” is flat out contradicted by experience. If any one is going to be a target for abuse and harrassment by other patrons in most bars, it’s probably going to be lesbians “express(ing) intimacy”. I honestly wonder whether better bouncers and more sensitivity might have solved this problem.
Tim Dunlop has very astutely picked up on an intriguing tidbit from Howard’s attack on Labor delivered at a business dinner last night:
Instead of rolling back a reform that’s been implemented, we should be reaching forward to the next reform.
Therein lies the commentariat’s answer to the question posed after the “Fairness Test” - why is IR still a bleeding sore for the Coalition after it’s supposedly been neutralised? Everyone knows that WorkChoices wasn’t put to the people in 2004. It may be the act of a “clever politician” to try to soften its edges before this year’s campaign, but the conviction politician has a big trust deficit to face on his IR agenda.
Howard was advised last week, probably fairly astutely, that he should stop trying to play on Labor’s turf by attempting to trump policy initiatives in areas like education. “It’s the economy, stupid” was the message.
For the blessed few, the artistry of Jeff Lang is not a mystery. You can be assured that his gig at Lizotte’s on Sunday night was another masterful performance. For the uninitiated, to not know Jeff Lang is to have a yawning hole in your musical soul.
Jeff Lang has been around for a while. He is a great songwriter, an expressive vocalist and gifted guitarist. Yet while other similar artists seem to make the ripples in the mainstream world, Jeff seems to move just below the surface; one of Australia’s well known musical secrets. An apt comparison would be Richard Thompson in terms of acclaim, skills and recognition.
Continue reading ‘Love, revenge and remorse. An evening with Jeff Lang’
The latest Newspoll and Morgan Poll return strikingly similar figures for the estimated two-party preferred vote and major party primary vote. Both estimate the 2PP vote as 60-40 in favour of Labor over the Coalition. Labor’s primary vote is estimated at 52 per cent by Newspoll and 51 per cent by Morgan, whilst the Coalition vote is estimated at 35 per cent by Newspoll and 35.5 per cent by Morgan.
Where the interesting discrepancy arises is in the figures for the Greens and other minor parties or independents. Newspoll has the Greens on 3 per cent and “Others” on 10 per cent, whereas Morgan has the Greens on 8 per cent and the combined vote for the Democrats, Family First, One Nation and “Independent/others” at 5.5 per cent. The Morgan estimate of the Greens vote is in the same range as the most recent AC Nielsen and Galaxy polls (7 and 9 per cent respectively).
I have previously commented on Newspoll’s underestimation of the Green vote in recent State elections, and there is prima facie reason to believe that Newspoll is also underestimating the Greens’ Federal vote. Comparing the two most recent polls suggests two possible explanations for the discrepancy. One is that Newspoll polls people by phoning to landline numbers whereas Morgan relies on in-person interviews. There was some discussion of this on the earlier thread. The other is that the way the poll question is posed could be influencing the responses. Morgan asks: “If a Federal election for the House of Representatives were being held today - which party would receive your first preference?â€? whilst Newspoll asks: “If a Federal election for the House of Representatives were held today, which one of the following would you vote for? [Presumably with a list of ‘the following’ - PN] If ‘uncommitted’, to which one of these do you have a leaning?”
What do others think?
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