I don’t have anything to say, other than to express my grief at the loss suffered by so many. Others may have more insights to offer

The Noosa Triathlon is coming up on Sunday, and there’s still time to give to Heartkids, the charity I’m supporting. Just click on the picture in the right-hand sidebar. Or, if you’d prefer a different charity, why don’t you give now, and (if you like) post a comment announcing it. Either way, it’s a great chance to help others.

Back before many readers of this blog were born, there was a TV ad campaign “Life, Be In It“, encouraging us all to be more active. It featured a jolly, middle-aged, mildly overweight character called Norm (as in Norm Everage), and a jingle on the merits of “Thirty Minutes a Day” of moderate exercise.

I think of myself as a lot more energetic and exercise-oriented than Norm, and being a data fan, I record most of my exercise using Runkeeper. So, I finally got around to checking the duration stats and was surprised to find that I do only about 20 hours of running, cycling and swimming in the average month[1]. That’s just 40 minutes a day. You can take from that what you will, but my thought is that, unless you’re aiming to qualify for the Boston Marathon, or, like me,you just enjoy exercise, Norm was right. 30 minutes a day is all you need.

fn1. That doesn’t including walking, short cycle trips to work and the shops, and occasional gym workouts, but those things wouldn’t add more than 20 mins a day.

Since long before I started blogging, I’ve been planning a big article on the prospects for Utopia, starting off from Keynes’ essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. While I procrastinated, lots of others had the same idea, most recently Robert and Edward Skidelsky. But, with encouragement from Ed Lake at Aeon Magazine, I went ahead anyway and the article has just appeared.

This is also a good time to announce that our long-promised book event on Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias is going ahead, with a target publication date of March 2013.

I seem to be back on air for the moment, so I’m taking the chance to appeal for doantions to the HeartKids appeal. My team partner Flavio and I have committed to raise $2000, but we are still $130 short. Please help to push us over the line, and we will push to get ourselves over the line in Noosa. Just click on the link and give money!

Some good news! I’ve just been awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship to work on uncertainty and financial crises. That means five more years of funding. I’ve been stringing various ARC Fellowships, Federation Fellowships and so on together since the mid-1990s, and there’s always an anxious wait when one is about to run out, and the new ones have not been announced – there’s no guarantee, or even presumption, that winning one means you will get another, and there’s plenty of competition, so it’s a matter of starting from scratch every time. The really nice time, starting now, is the last few months of the old grant, when I get to wrap things up and contemplate the start of something new. I’m very grateful to the Australian government for supporting me in my research over all these years.

To support my fundraising appeal for HeartKids Queensland. Just click on the ad on the right and give money[1]. It would be great to reach $2000 by the end of the financial year (30 June).

An added incentive – after the carbon tax comes in on Sunday, money will be worthless and bank balances will be confiscated by the UN[2], so you may as well give generously while you still can.

fn1. Unfortunately, the widget isn’t updating the total amount at the moment, but I’ll announce it soon.
fn2. Oops, not sure if I was supposed to pre-announce that, so don’t tell anyone

In comments, David Barry, winner of the previous crowdsourcing contest writes

I would be interested in seeing how much global research funding goes towards different diseases. My goal here is to see if research funding into a disease is roughly proportional to the global burden of the disease, or if there are relatively under- and over-funded areas; the former might then be the best place for individuals to donate to, if they want to support medical research.

The global burdens are on the WHO’s website: http://www.who.int/healthinfo/global_burden_disease/estimates_regional/en/index.html I don’t know where I’d find funding statistics. As a first step, I’d be happy with just US/EU government agency funding data. For instance, the National Cancer Institute has a nice table here, http://www.cancer.gov/cancertopics/factsheet/NCI/research-funding

This is a great topic, and I encourage readers to look into it. I’d offer the minor caveat that research is conditioned to some extent by the availability of researchable topics. For example, I believe (though I’m happy to be proved wrong) that the mortality rates from prostate cancer are similar to those for breast cancer, but that breast cancer research gets much more funding. As I understand it, this is mainly because there don’t appear to be as many promising avenues for research on prostate cancer.

Also, a reminder that my crowdsourcing request for a simple model-based estimate of the date at which a minority of Census respondents will identify as Christian is now open. (Minor update: The proportion claiming Christian affililation fell from 64 to 61 per cent between 2006 and 2011. Simple extrapolation gives a target date of 2031. I’m sure a model with some demography would do better than this).

I’ve seen a bunch of reports from the census saying that the proportion of Australians reporting “no religion” has increased substantially, to around 22 per cent. I’d be interested to know if this is mainly a cohort effect (non-believing younger generations entering the population) or the result of people who previously reported a religious affiliation switching to reporting none. I’d be surprised if much of it was the result of people abandoning previous religious beliefs, as opposed to nominal affiliations, but I don’t think the data allows a test of this.

I just had a brilliant idea for how to motivate this effort. The first person to give a good answer gets to nominate the next topic for crowdsourcing. As a hint, the ideal way to answer the question would be to compare responses from a given age group in 2006 with the same group, now 5 years older, in 2011, adjusting, if possible for migration effects.

Update: The evidence, collected in the comments threads, suggests that cohort and conversion effects each account for about half of the shift.

The prize goes to David Barry, with honorable mentions to Aldonius and Luke Elford. I’ll give Dave first shot at proposing a new topic (in comments), but also invite suggestions from Luke and Aldonius. Meanwhile, I’m going to suggest something a bit more challenging for crowd-sourcing. If anyone would like to use the data to develop a simple model to project likely changes in stated Census affilations over the next two decades, with a specific focus on the question “When will (Census reported) Christian affilation become a minority response in Australia”, I’ll add a write up and send it as a joint post to The Conversation, the new(ish) academic-focused website.