Month: March 2006

Factions

John Quiggin47 Comments

Julia Gillard and Simon Crean have both had good things to say about factions in the ALP lately. As Gillard observes, it’s no longer factions but fractions.

This would be a good time for Gillard in particular to put her arguments into practice by proposing the dissolution of the Left faction in the Parliamentary party and, failing that, withdrawing from the group. It’s been at least a decade since the “Left” has had any distinct policy position, and unlike the Right, the faction doesn’t justify its existence by delivering the top jobs to its members. Far from providing effective opposition to the Right machine, the Left justifies the existence of the Right.

If, say, 40 per cent of the Parliamentary Party were independent of any faction, and agreed to vote against candidates generated by intra-party factions, it wouldn’t be hard to peel off enough members of the Right to bring the whole corrupt system to an end at the Parliamentary level. And if the Parliamentary leadership was anti-factional, their votes would control the National Executive and permit intervention to break the factions in the state branches.

No surprises here

John Quiggin31 Comments

It’s a while since I’ve done a full-length post on the AWB scandal, so I thought it might be time to see if anything surprising had emerged. Based on past experience, it seemed pretty clear that we could expect to find out that

1. Both Downer and Howard knew that the AWB was paying kickbacks to the Iraqi regime

2. This information was transmitted in a way that preserves deniability, so no conclusive proof will emerge

3. No government minister will resign

4. Endless hair-splitting defences of the government’s actions in this matter will emerge from those who have previously made a loud noise about Oil for Food.

The only surprise has been how thoroughly each of these has been confirmed.
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Plug

John Quiggin1 Comment

Occasional commenter “mick” has been in touch to advise me of a public lecture series to be held in Brisbane. The lecture series is entitled “BrisScience”, and will involve a number of excellent scientists giving lectures on their topics of interest for the general public. The website is here. All of the lectures are free, there is one talk a month, and they will all be held in the Judith Wright Center of Contemporary Arts in the Valley.

The first lecture is by John Mattick on “junk” DNA, which IIRC has been the subject of a very dubious intellectual property claim by an Australian entrepreneur. But the talk won’t be about IP, which should make it more interesting for about 99 per cent of the potential audience. John argues that the extra DNA is the opposite of junk: it may be ultimately responsible for the development of all life more complex than bacteria.

Blonde joke

John Quiggin33 Comments

The latest evolutionary psychology[1] theory to do the rounds is that blondeness evolved as a selection strategem for women trying to attract scarce mates in the harsh and male-scarce conditions of Ice Age Europe. According to this report in the Times, the theory has been formulated by an anthropologist, Peter Frost. His supporting argument is that blondeness is a signal of high levels of oestrogen. I suppose I should wait for the article which is supposed to come out in Evolution and Human Behaviour, but I can’t resist pointing to an obvious hole and an alternative explanation.

The obvious hole is that blond(e)ness is not a sex-linked characteristic. If light hair colour signals high oestrogen, blond men should have a lot of trouble attracting mates. Tempted as I am by this hypothesis, I can’t say I’ve seen any evidence to back it up.

The alternative explanation (not at all novel) is that fair hair arose in conjunction with pale skin, as a straightforward physical adaption to the move away from the tropics – less need for pigment, or maybe more need to absorb vitamin D.
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What I’ve been reading

John Quiggin15 Comments

The Feynmann processor: an introduction to quantum computation by Gerard Milburn. Like (I expect) most of us, I’ve never understood anything about quantum computation and have been vaguely suspicious that the whole project involves some kind of spurious informational free lunch. On the other hand, having read Feynmann’s excellent QED, I’m reasonably comfortable with the basic ideas of quantum electrodynamics (though I’ve never got on top of the nasty integrals required to actually work anything out). Feynmann’s discussion in terms of probabilty amplitudes steers clear of all that Heisenberg-style mysticism that seems to make the whole subject incomprehensible.

Anyway, this post by John Holbo at CT, and particularly this comment, led me to a Wikipedia article which made it clear how you quantum processing could yield impressive gains without any magical mumbo-jumbo, so I went on to look for more, and found this book in the library. It’s very easy going for a general reader, and makes things pretty clear, though I took a couple of readings to get the details straight.

As it happens, Gerard is at UQ and got a Federation Fellowship at the same time I did, so I’ll probably be pestering him for more info on all this.

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin28 Comments

Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.

Good timing

John Quiggin33 Comments

My opinion piece in yesterday’s Fin (over the fold) was about Ministerial responsibility, drawing on the discussion we had here. My central point was that Ministers should be esponsible for their own offices. That is, if a Minister’s personal staff are complicit in breaches of the law, or fail to act on information, the Minister should be presumed responsible for this.

Today comes the news that Howard’s office got a cable about the AWB scandal in 2000, but neglected to tell him about it.
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Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia

John Quiggin123 Comments

When I first saw this Fox caption capture from Media Matters linked at Surfdom, I thought it was some sort of aberration. But the idea that civil war in Iraq would be a good thing has already made it into the opinion pages of the Oz, propounded by Daniel Pipes. The same from James Joyner and Vodkapundit, though Glenn Reynolds demurs mildly.

Meanwhile, as Tim D notes, doublethink is SOP at Fox. As far as I can tell, the official pro-war position now emerging is

* there is no civil war in Iraq
* there will be no civil war in Iraq
* if civil war comes, it won’t be our fault
* when civil war comes, it will be a good thing

Unfortunately, at this point there’s not much anyone can do. The US and Uk have long since lost control of the situation, and the dynamic has gone beyond the control of any individual or group in Iraq. We’ll just have to hope that the Iraqi leaders (Sistani and Sadr on the Shia side, and the various groups contending to represent the Sunni Arabs and Kurds, among others) can pull something out of the fire between them.

Wikipedia and sausages

John Quiggin39 Comments

Sometime in the next couple of days, the one-millionth article will be added to the English-language version of Wikipedia. It’s an impressive achievement for a project that’s only five years old , and it’s already clear that Wikipedia has surpassed its main competitors, Encyclopedia Britannica and Microsoft’s Encarta in many important respects. Neither Britannica’s 200-year history and expert staff nor the Microsoft juggernaut have proved a match for Wikipedia’s ten thousand or so regular contributors, and thousands of occasional helpers. While many criticisms of Wikipedia have been made (as with most things, the most comprehensive source for such criticisms is Wikipedia, none has really dented either Wikipedia’s credibility or its growth.

Still, as Bismarck is supposed to have said

If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.”

The process by which Wikipedia entries are produced is, in many cases, far from edifying: the marvel, as with democracies and markets, is that the outcomes are as good as they are.

I’ve been active on Wikipedia for several months now, and found out some interesting things.
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