ANZ is offering to match donations to charity made by its Internet banking customers. There’s a choice of eight charities, so their should be something for people of all tastes and ideological views.

And, particularly if you’re a top-bracket taxpayer, it’s an offer too good to miss as the end of the tax year approaches. Give, say, $200 to your preferred charity. ANZ’s matching money will bring it up to $400. Then Mr Costello will refund you $100 (well, $96.80 or thereabouts), so you get $400 worth of warm inner glow for the price of a couple of tickets to the footy.

Banks being banks, I was naturally suspicious. But I tried it out and the documentation came back indicating that everything had gone as promised. I guess you have to sign up as an ANZ customer to take advantage of this. But it’s no big hassle and loyalty to one bank is a thing of the past – there’s no need to scrap your existing arrangements if you don’t want to.

Rob Corr sent me this music meme. I’ve done my own list, over the fold. Showing my age, again!
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I was reading this story in The New Republic (subscription required, I think) about the problems of US cities and it struck me that little of the discussion would make sense in an Australian context, simply because Americans and Australians understand the city-suburb distinction quite differently. As noted here, in Australia , a suburb means “one of the units comprising a city”, corresponding roughly to the American “neighborhood”. By contrast, in the US the term is understood to mean “a district, especially a residential one, on the edge of a city or large town”. British usage is somewhere between the two, but closer to Australian.

This distinction is reinforced by the fiscal system in the US, where more tax is raised, at the local government level, and more functions, notably education are undertaken by local government, so the boundary between local governments makes a bigger difference. This seems to cause a lot of problems, with the result that US cities seem to be in difficulty most of the time. Perhaps the Australian setup produces different problems that aren’t so obvious or pressing.

Beyond this, though, I think there really is something to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis here. The fact that everyone in Australia regards the suburbs as part of the city to which they belong, regardless of local government boundaries, affects the way we think about all sorts of things. For example, even if inner-city suburbs are thought of as hipper and cooler than the outer suburbs, the distinction is one of degree rather than kind, since there is no sharp dividing line between the two, so we don’t really have an urban/suburban distinction in the way that Americans do.

Over at Crooked Timber, Eszter has a post on physicists doing social network theory , which raises the issue of ‘reinventing the wheel’. In this case, the physicists are breathlessly announcing results that sociologists have known about for years.

That’s obviously silly, but I don’t think reinventing the wheel is entirely a bad thing. Whenever I start on a new research topic, I like to spend a bit of time thinking about the issues on the basis of first principles, before I start reading the literature to see what others have done. The benefit of this is not that you’re likely to discover anything fundamentally new, but that it makes it easier to see what is central to the literature and what’s merely the accidental result of its development history (Professor X, the founder of the field, stressed assumption A, so all subsequent writers pay homage to it, and so on). Of course, this is only useful if you can subsequently engage with the existing literature.

My short summary “By all means have a go at reinventing the wheel, but don’t try to patent it[1]”

fn1. Apart from anything else, this guy has already done it

Update As James Farrell reminds me, I’m reinventing my own wheel here.

As I mentioned a couple of posts down, I’ve become pretty blase about letters from journals, at least to the extent that getting a rejection doesn’t bother me in the slightest. But I still get excited about the results from my annual karate grading, and I’m happy to say the news is good. I was hoping to be promoted to 7th kyu, which would have given me a black tip for my blue belt. Since our Kancho (founder) doesn’t encourage you to grade unless he thinks you’re ready, I was reasonably confident, but still nervous[1]. But when the results were announced, I’d reached 6th kyu and a yellow belt. Standards in our style are pretty high, and I can’t imagine ever getting a black belt. But a year ago, I would have thought a yellow belt was unattainable.

If you live in Brisbane or the Gold Coast and would like to learn karate in a rigorous traditional style, but with a friendly and non-threatening, mixed-age and mixed gender group, give Seiyushin a try.

fn1. Another successful grading meant I won a bet, in which my forfeit would have been watching a Dragonball Z movie marathon. Deliverance!

Yesterday’s mail from the journals included one rejection, one acceptance and one revise-and-resubmit. Not a triumphant day, but I was happy enough, since major economics journals often have rejection rates of 90 per cent or more[1], and revise-and-resubmits generally lead to acceptance in the end.

As a result of this process, a big part of an academic’s research life consists of dealing with rejections. I gave up counting them after the first hundred or so, and it’s water off a duck’s back to me now, but this is something people starting out in academic life often find very hard to deal with. I can’t say I find the system satisfactory, but I don’t have an adequate alternative to offer.

fn1. The same is true in quite a few other disciplines, though not all.

Being focused on martial arts at the moment, I’ve run across quite a few references to boxing, an activity which continues to mystify me. My big question about is: whose idea was it to give boxers gloves? It seems like a recipe for protecting the fists (the bit that hurts most, in my experience) while maximising the potential for brain damage, thereby being simultaneously wimpy and deadly.

I also saw in the UQ News a story about the exclusion of women from boxing, which made the obligatory reference to Million Dollar Baby, a film I haven’t seen yet, though I plan to. It struck me that, of the sports I’ve had any involvement with [not that many, I admit] karate is easily the most gender-integrated. Women and men routinely train together, and, in my experience around 30 per cent of the participants in the average tournament would be women.

I’m not suggesting that non-Western martial arts are some sort of gender-neutral utopia, but the contrast with boxing is still pretty striking.

Today is a bit of a red letter day for me as the late email brought in my second journal article acceptance for the day: the first time I’ve managed this, I think, though I’ve had three rejections in the same day before now. So no more work for me; it’s time to uncork the Hentschke’s Hensckes!Henschke’s

At Larvatus Prodeo, and at Catallaxy, they’re debating the question of whether you can dismiss an author based on ‘a brief skimming’, which I’ll take, along with some participant in the discussion, to mean five minutes of reading.

My answer to this question, which has arisen before now on this blog is “Absolutely”. At skimming or fast reading speed, five minutes gives you 5000 words, which is more than enough to conclude that a writer is guilty of gross logical or factual errors, pretentious or illiterate prose, repetition of tired and long-refuted arguments, or simple inanity. The idea, commonly put forward in defence of various indefensible types, that you can’t criticise someone unless you have read every word they have ever written is simple nonsense. It’s true that there are people who produce the odd pearl among an output more generally fit for swine. But in such cases, it’s up to their defenders to point out the gems: the volume of words is so great, and the average quality so low, that a demand to read everything is simply impossible.

I should concede that, on one or two occasions, I’ve got into trouble through misreading someone in the first five minutes, after which pride and prejudice does the rest. But in general, five minutes is enough to form a well-founded negative judgement in a great many cases.