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.
Guest post from Rhonda Stone
By email, Rhonda Stone has sent in the following piece relating to earlier discussions here. Comments are welcome, but, remember that Rhonda is a guest, and please be particularly sure to stick to civilised discussion. Comments that abuse the poster or other commenters will be deleted.
If the brain reads sentences through a process of decoding or otherwise identifying individual words, how is it possible to read this:
B4UASsM2MCH ABT RDNG, cnsdr tht th BRNISWNDRFLY KreaTV& efcnt.
(copyright, 2005, Dee Tadlock, Ph.D., Read Right Systems, Inc.)
I would love to know if it has occurred to many of your readers that neither the phonics and decoding view of reading and development nor whole language philosophy accurately reflect what it is that the brain does when it reads sentences? What if individual word identification and sentence reading are completely seperate cognitive acts? What would that mean to our understanding of what must be done to prevent and correct reading problems?
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For daylight saving
Mark Bahnisch comes out against daylight saving, arguing that, in Brisbane’s summer weather it’s better to finish work after sunset.
I’m generally in favour as I tend to wake up with the sun. Because Brisbane is so far east (we’re not far from Byron Bay), sunrise in summer is very early – it’s light before 5am. In some ways, that’s good (it’s a great time to get work done), but not if you want to stay up past about 9pm. It gets dark pretty early, around 6:30.
I suspect that daylight saving here does little more than restore the time in Brisbane to what it would be under “God’s time”, without time zones or other fiddles.
The problem is, of course, that the state is big in both directions. The tropics have very little seasonal variation in the length of the day, which makes daylight saving in summer nonsensical while the west has the opposite problem to Brisbane. But given that we have to have one time zone for the whole state (an internal border would be ludicrous), we should pick it to suit the majority, who live in the Southeast corner.
Of course, anyone who really doesn’t like daylight saving could leave their watch unchanged, stick to their old schedules as far as possible, and just bear in mind that everyone else is using a different time. The reverse is true in the present situation if you really like daylight saving.
IR reform and inequality
It looks as if the IR legislation will be passed through the Parliament while we are all changing the channel to get away from the barrage of ads supporting it, so I suppose I’d better comment now, before taking the time to wade through the 600 pages of simplification the government is giving us. I’m mainly concerned with the likely impact on inequality
Taking the central elements of the legislation separately, it’s possible to make a case in regard to any one of them that the effect on inequality will be modest, or even favourable. It can be pointed out, for example, that many minimum wage earners are in high-income households, so a lower minimum wage won’t be so bad. And making it easier to sack people ought to promote more hiring as well as more firing, which should be good for those who are now unemployed.
These arguments are plausible, but not clear-cut. On the other hand, when we look at the macro evidence, we get very clear evidence pointing the other way. Wherever reforms like this have been introduced, notably the UK and NZ, inequality has increased drastically on almost all dimensions (capital vs labour, variance in wages, wage premiums of all kind, unequal allocation of work). In the US, where these institutions have been entrenched for a long time, inequality is higher than in any other developed country and getting rapidly worse.
It may not be clear which piece of the reform package is doing the work, but the aggregate outcome can be predicted with safety.
Make them pay, part 2
In response to my last post about taxpayer-funded IR propaganda, Things I’ve Seen comes up with a neat suggestion.
At the end of every advert, where we currently have “Authorised by”, add “This advert was paid for by the Australian taxpayer”. Then let democracy take its course.
The neat thing is that if ads were genuinely helpful and informative, tazpayer-viewers wouldn’t mind.
A requirement of this kind could be inserted by legislation, and it would be a brave government that subsequently removed it. Of course, it would only happen if it could be done in the first few days after a change of government, when the habits of power had not yet grown familiar.
League tables
Everybody loves league tables, especially when they do well. A couple of people (Graeme Halford and Jack Strocchi) pointed me to the Times Higher Education Supplement university league tables. Unfortunately the tables themselves are behind a paywall, but those ranked highly have not been quiet about it. The University of Queensland is ranked in the top 50 in the world and, for the social sciences, comes in at number 25. (It’s a bit annoying, by the way that the UQ press release runs first on the #29 ranking in biomedical science, and lists social sciences as an also-ran)
This is a pretty impressive ranking, though I’d be interested to see the criteria that put 17 Australian universities in the world’s top 200, compared to 54 in the US and 24 in Britain. It seems to overstate our relative importance, and to suggest that we are punching way above our weight. Still, the THES doesn’t seem likely to suffer from pro-Australian bias.
Hundred-thousand dollar baby
Feeding http://www.johnquiggin.com into this calculation applet, it’s estimated to be worth $US108,391.68, using the same link-to-dollar ratio as the AOL purchase of Weblogs Inc deal for a rumoured $25 million. Crooked Timber is worth nearly a million
fn1. Presumably AOL based its purchase on the value of ads, which are hypothetical in this case.
Self-referential
My column in last weeks Fin (over the fold) was about the implications of blogs and wikis, particularly Wikipedia for the business model of Google, Yahoo and similar firms. Looking at Wikipedia a few days later, not only did I have an entry (not there last time I looked), but my piece had already been quoted. Clearly Wikipedia is as collectively self-aware as any of us self-Googling narcissists.
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Monday message board
It’s time, once again for the Monday Message Board. As usual, civilised discussion and no coarse language, please.
More terror attacks
More than 50 people have been killed in the latest terror attacks in Delhi. As usual in a globalised world, the victims apparently include Indians and foreign visitors, Hindus and Muslims and people of all social classes. Its premature to speculate on which particular group is responsible for this crime, but almost certainly it’s a group horrified by the prospect that peace might break out between India and Pakistan as the two countries work together to respond to the tragic earthquake in Pakistan.
John Quiggin 