steve keen: asking why

Steve Keen has successfully completed his Australian house pricing awareness walk from Parliament House, Canberra, to the peak of Mt. Kosciuszko. There are now posts and photos from those who walked with him going up on the walk site. David Lawson who trained in neo classical economics, then worked in Real Estate and has now abandoned those things. Nina Shedrin a former Russian rocket scientist who is worried about her daughter's generation becoming trapped in a house mortage. More to come.

Steve Keen is doing an amazing job of alerting people to problems in the economic system and encouraging them to dig deeper. His personality is described by David Lawson:

After spending time with Steve Keen on his journey from Canberra to the top of Mt Kosciousko, I have come to know him as a man who always asks the question ‘why?’ He thrives on the challenges that life has to offer, both physically and mentally. Clearly an extremely intelligent man, he also has heart of gold, strong morals and a great sense of humour. There is no wonder why he pursues the work he does

IPCC consensus unravels from within

Judy Curry's Q&A about the CRU Oxburgh investigation findings and her repeated assertion of IPCC corruption is well worth a read: an inconvenient provocateur

Combine that with Pielke snrs blog posts about fundamental issues and we see that the IPCC consensus is unraveled not just in the eyes of ranting sceptics but from within, from peer reviewed published climate scientists

Where does that leave us? Back to where science is treated as a contested method or methods of investigation and not as a source of authoritative pronouncement.

Dan Meyer: maths teacher

How to convert text book word problems which spoon feed too much into problems that students will have a conversation about and go onto solve with slower but deeper thinking. Even better, Dan is an entertaining presenter who combines humour with socially important knowledge and modern technology.

Steve Keen walk begins today

Steve Keen's regular blog: Debt deflation
Debunking Economics website
Keen Walk to Kosciuszko

Steve Keen begins his protest walk against Australian house prices, today, starting from Parliament House, Canberra. This arose because he lost a bet in predicting that Australian house prices would fall and they haven't, so far. Read the links above for more detail.

I admire the way in which Steve Keen has turned a bad bet into a good thing, a protest to raise awareness about the state of the Australian economy. He has generated a lot of interest and support with many people joining him on his walk.

I'm interested in Steve's ideas about Minsky, Fisher, Sraffa, Marx etc and have been reading his extensive online publications in trying to deepen my understanding of political economy arising out of the current and ongoing economic crisis.

Steve Keen is the sort of public intellectual we need. He puts his ideas up for public scrutiny and engages in public debate about them through his blog. I have read enough to understand that econometrics which dominates my local university curriculum (and apparently many others) is a narrow subset of what economic study ought to be. Clearly there needs to be a revolution in university economic departments to bring in the theories of thinkers such as Minsky or Marx who predicted that capitalism would always be an unstable system.

monkeys challenge God

Put the Pope in the Dock by Geoffrey Robertson

This article puts the legal case for holding Pope accountable for covering up child sex abuse and that it is doubtful that he can claim immunity as a head of state. The initiator of this move was Christopher Hitchens. Richard Dawkins elaborates in a letter to the Sunday Times which gave him the credit with a headline that made him seem personally grandiloquent.

The Pope should not be above the law. Human mental evolution has continued since 1860 (Huxley versus Wilberforce)

Arundhati Roy: not looking away

On the news in between the latest road accident and the football results you might hear how the Indian Army has marched into a forest region to wage war against the "maoist extremists".

If you are curious and would like to hear the inside story then read Arundhati Roy's beautifully written Walking with Comrades. Arundhati Roy is a Booker Prize winning author (The God of Small Things)

I’m going to get a history lesson. Or, more accurately a lecture on the history of the last thirty years in the Dandakaranya forest, which has culminated in the war that’s swirling through it today. For sure, it’s a partisan’s version. But then, what history isn’t? In any case, the secret history must be made public if it is to be contested, argued with, instead of merely being lied about, which is what is happening now.

Feynman: utter honesty required

The following Richard Feynman quote was quoted in a climate change discussion at Roger Pielke Jnr's blog. Roger's blog provides a whole range of excellent and seems to me reliable information about "problems" (including corruption) with the IPCC official science. Roger and his other guest contributors think that global warming is an important issue but argue that it is being managed poorly by most politicians and many scientists. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the overlap of the AGW issue with the economics, science and politics of it.

The Feynman quote and the whole article applies to any serious search for truth.

CARGO CULT SCIENCE by Richard Feynman

It is interesting, therefore, to bring it out now and speak of it explicitly. It's a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty--a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you're doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid--not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you've eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked--to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can--if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong--to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.

Charlie Perkins

There was a program on ABC TV last night about Charlie Perkins (1936-2000), an Australian aboriginal activist. It was very moving. It was narrated by his daughter.

The thing about Charlie Perkins is that there was never any bullshit but also he knew how to handle himself politically, he would make his point directly but not overstate it. He was a very effective advocate for aboriginal people in an Australia that was racist but then gradually emerged from racism.

There is a website, Charles Perkins, with video clips and extracts from the documentary. I read some of the transcript of an interview with Perkins towards the end of his life. This bit about how he represented the aborginal people in presenting to the Queen against the wishes of Malcom Fraser, the Prime Minister, is very funny:

And the next minute, the Queen comes around, stops, and who should be behind her, but big Malcolm. Well Malcolm was looking at me as though he wished I'd fall through a big hole in the ground. You know, his eyes were just riveting, and he waited for me to pull out a petition and everything. And I ... and the Queen come and said, 'Mm, Mr Perkins?' I said, 'Yes'. I never bowed, because I don't believe in that stuff. And I said, 'Eileen, don't you curtsy or nothing', I said, 'Just treat her just the same as everybody else', you know, and we did. We treated her with respect. I said, 'Yeah, good to see Your Majesty. Good to see you in Australia, and I'd like to, as an Aboriginal person, welcome you to this country'. And I said, 'You'll find no problem from us. We'll treat you decently'. 'Oh', she said, 'Thank you very much for that'. And of course, Fraser's going, [SHAKES HEAD] you know, and others around him are all screwing up their fingers, wishing to throttle me, I would presume. And then I said to her, 'I'll tell you what, you know, it's ... I was going to give you a petition, but I'm not going to give you that tonight, but I'll tell you what it's about. But I gave it to your right hand man, that Sir Something or Other, and he was a nice fellow, and he took it and he said that you're going to read it, is that right?' She said, 'Yes, I've given my word. I'll read that petition'. And I said, 'Well, that's good. That's all I wanted to know, and I won't embarrass you or nothing, but I'll tell you what I'll do. The Aboriginal people asked me to give you a present from us, not from the Australian Government, from us Aboriginal people', and it came off my walls by the way. It was a boomerang and a shield I took, because we couldn't find it in time, and I said, 'But it's a boomerang and some shield and things like that, we think are very important. It's got Aboriginal markings on them', but I said, 'We'll give it you, but please, would you not put it down back in your shed, down the back, you know, where people like yourself get a lot of important things, and you put it down the sheds, or back rooms, and so on. Can you hang it in an important place in Buckingham Palace?' I said, 'That's why we'll give it to you'. She said, 'I'll do that'. I said, 'Yeah, if you do that, then you can have them'. She said, 'All right'. So she ... and I said, 'Well now, I got nothing more to say. I've got no petition and that. That's all I want to say, and welcome to Australia again. Nice to see you'. And you know, 'Come again any time you like'. So, of course, the other lads were waiting out their says, so we moved aside, and then she went on, you know, and I just waited until the right time, and Eileen and I just sneaked out and then went home.
- full interview transcript

Hansen's book and sea level increase

Reading James Hansen's book, Storms of my Grandchildren, has convinced me that AGW (anthropogenic global warming) is a real problem. I won't attempt to summarise the book except to say that it is an outstanding  example of clear science communication to the public.

I haven't looked closely at the issue of species extinction yet but Hansen and other research convinces me that the threat of rising sea levels is real and that the IPCC estimates are conservative. Sea level rise is difficult for humans to adapt to since so many people and important cities are located around the coastline. I hadn't thought about this much before. I had thought that Climate might or might not be changing but the IPCC maximum projection of 59cm in the next century was a maximum and was sufficiently far off in the future to be not a major problem.

Hansen points out that sea level stability has been with us for approximately 7,000 years and that this provided enormous advantages for the emergence of civilisation, such as increased fish breeding around the coasts providing a high protein diet for a settled population. He also uses paleoclimate data to point out that in the previous interglacial, the Eemian, 140,000 years ago, at one stage the climate was only 1 degree Celcius warmer and the sea level was 4-6 metres higher. See Fig. 3 (source)

My thinking was guided by the idea that everything changes continually anyway and in general new technological discoveries can be used to overcome new problems as they arise. I still think this is correct as a generalisation but I can't think of anyway in which new technologies would overcome a significant sea level rise for millions of people. Of course, it's possible / probable that sea level will rise anyway, sooner or later,  and we will have to adapt. But it seems that we have reached the point where we do have some control over the climate and should collectively exercise that control.

Back to the present, the evidence from the GRACE satellites (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) and other data indicates that the ice sheets in Antarctica (especially West Antarctica) and Greenland are losing mass at an accelerating rate. The GRACE figures are in gigatonne per year and the mass loss is accelerating over the period measured (2002-09) on both sheets:

In Greenland, the mass loss increased from 137 Gt/yr in 2002–2003 to 286 Gt/yr in 2007–2009, i.e., an acceleration of −30 ± 11 Gt/yr2 in 2002–2009. In Antarctica the mass loss increased from 104 Gt/yr in 2002–2006 to 246 Gt/yr in 2006–2009, i.e., an acceleration of −26 ± 14 Gt/yr2 in 2002–2009.
- source

A central issue is the inertia of the oceans and the ice sheets. Ice begins to melt slowly but the rate accelerates over time. Ice in the wild has different dynamics. Ice flows, ice can get dirty, moulins can form to accelerate the destruction etc. With oceans the warming process is much slower overall but the quicker part is early rather than late. These combined inertias create the threat that if you go past a tipping point, which we can’t predict, then you can’t recover from it. We may be letting systems which are controllable to an extent slip out of control. With so many people living in coastal regions then anything faster than the IPCC predictions would be a real concern for future generations.

I still think that economic and industrial development is very important for everyone, especially for the developing world. Since we have the nuclear energy option I don't see any reason for pessimism about the long term energy future for humans.  However, the present problem is that nuclear is more expensive and subject to excessive regulation owing to the widespread fear of anything nuclear. These issues have been and are being discussed in detail at Barry Brook's  blog, Brave New Climate.

At the moment I'm particular interested in the threat of rising sea levels. I found another excellent blog, Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism which has a series of posts about this question. This amazing page lists 94 skeptical arguments and links to responses to all of them based on reviews of peer reviewed papers by John Cook, a Queensland physicist. Here are some of the links to Cook's blog which directly or indirectly look at the issue of rising sea levels:

Sea levels aren't rising
Ice isn't melting
How much will sea levels rise in the 21st Century?
Is Greenland gaining or losing ice?
It's the ocean
Arctic ice melt is a natural cycle
Does ocean cooling prove global warming has ended?

Reading these references makes me think that the IPCC maximum estimate is a conservative one and the sea level may well rise faster than that. This video provides an illustration of how the ice sheet dynamics might work, explains the reasons for IPCC conservatism and looks at some of the paleoclimate data. The section right at the end is overly alarmist but overall it's worth watching:

james hansen

I've booked into the James Hansen presentation on March 11th in Adelaide, South Australia.

I've started reading his book, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity. Here are some preliminary thoughts:

The full title of his book seems ridiculously melodramatic. I say this because we have a solution to worst case global warming scenarios (nuclear power) and Hansen knows about it and devotes a section in his book to it, pp. 194-204

Nevertheless, so far I'm very impressed by the way he lays out the big picture science in Chapter One. More on this later, hopefully.

I like the way in which he presents his differences with contrarian Richard Lindzen in Appendix 1. I was particularly interested in this because I have been influenced by Lindzen's articles.

Hansen explains that he is a shy person who would prefer to stay out of the limelight and just do the science. But because others can't explain the issues properly he has decided to speak out publicly more.

In the video clip below I think he is a bit too eager to blame the fossil fuel industry for clouding the picture. It would be better if the promotional video confined itself to the science.

living with offence

Kindly Inquisitors: The new attacks on free thought (1993) by Jonathan Rauch

Frances Widdowson (Offended by Offence) has recently reviewed this book on her blog. I liked her review and also the Kirkus review at amazon books. I haven't read the book. These brief notes are based on the reviews.

In our civilised democratic society (not Iran, China, etc.), the modern day equivalent of the Inquisition are the philosophies of egalitarianism and humanitarianism

ie. the principle of the Inquisition was that people with wrong or hurtful opinions ought to be punished for the good of society

egalitarianism - the beliefs of all sincere people deserve equal respect
humanitarianism - one must never offend

Taken separately and in particular when combined these outlooks undermine the pursuit of scientific truth by introducing a variety of mental and ideological barriers to free and open discussion. This is explained more in the reviews.

It is essential to learn the hard discipline of living with offence that will inevitably follow from this approach rather than fudging the quest for truth out of fear of offending others or being offended ourselves. Words might offend but as long it remains just words then we need to accept it and either argue back or move on, not try to censor it and to reject philosophies which attempt to censure open, vigorous discussion

Previous: This book reminds me of Frank Furedi's book, "Where have all the intellectuals gone?" which I did read and review
truth slips from view in the sea of post modern knowledge
how the left became conservative

economics of nuclear energy

Irrespective of other concerns (safety, disposal, proliferation of weapons) the generally accepted wisdom about the cost of nuclear generated electricity is that it is more expensive than electricity from coal or other fossil fuels.

I thought this as well until I researched it. Here are some notes

France is the number one country in the world which generates electricity from nuclear power. France derives over 75% of its electricity from nuclear energy. Their electricity costs are very competitive in Europe. France is the world's largest net exporter of electricity and gains over EUR 3 billion per year from this. (Nuclear Power in France)

In the 1970s in the USA electricity from nuclear power was sometimes cheaper than coal. But this situation reversed itself in the 1980s which led to many planned nuclear power stations being abandoned. The reasons for this are clearly documented in an online book, published in 1990, The Nuclear Energy Option, by Bernard Cohen. Here is a brief summary of his Chapter 9:

• construction time for nuclear plants doubled from 1971 (7 yrs) to 1980 (12 yrs), which in turn doubled the costs
• labour costs also doubled with the biggest increases being professional labour

(these figures corrected for inflation)

So, the cost of nuclear plants quadrupled in 10 years and as a result they were no longer built. The main reason for these increases were regulatory ratcheting (excessive) and regulatory turbulence (the latter being having to change things after the project has started and hence more expensive)

According to Cohen it was accepted wisdom by the utilities in the USA before the over regulation of the 1980s that nuclear would be cheaper than coal and would replace coal.

"Many utilities seek cost analyses from economics consulting firms, some utilities have their own in-house economists to make estimates, and banking organizations maintain expertise to aid in decisions on investments. From the early 1970s until the early 1980s, all of their reports found that nuclear power was the cheaper of the two. For example, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is the largest electric utility in the United States. Its profits, if any, are turned back to the U.S. Treasury. It maintained a large and active effort for many years in analyzing the relative cost advantages of nuclear versus coal-burning power plants, consistently finding that nuclear power was cheaper. The 1982 analysis by the Energy Information Administration, a branch of the U.S. Department of Energy, was the first to find that coal and nuclear were equal in cost; their previous analyses found nuclear to be cheaper. By 1982, these analyses were mostly discontinued, since it seemed unrealistic for a utility to consider building a nuclear power station, or even to hope that it could be done without regulatory turbulence"
- Ch. 10, The Nuclear Energy Option by Bernard Cohen

Tom Blees also discusses and updates answers to these questions in his book Prescription for the Planet. One of the important points he makes is that the modern reactor designs (Gen III and Gen IV) employ passive safety using molten sodium as a coolant and consequently do not have to operate under high pressure, except for the steam portion of the system in the turbine room. This means that significantly fewer valves, pumps and tanks are required compared with the older reactors. This lowers construction costs.

The other main point made by Blees about high costs in the USA (compared with France and some other countries) is that the nuclear industry there has yet to agree on a standard design and each new design has to jump many regulatory hurdles all of which pushes the cost of the process higher.

Thanks to Barry Brook's blog I recently attended a debate in which Tom Blees participated. Subsequently, I bought a few copies of his book and have distributed them to friends who are interested in discussing these questions.

I notice that the Obama administration has just announced a loan guarantee intended to underwrite construction of two nuclear reactors in Georgia. If the project goes forward, the reactors would be the first begun in the United States since the 1970s.

From what I have read I conclude that electricity from nuclear power could be as cheap as electricity from coal.

update 4th March: After a fair bit of discussion on threads at Strange Times (Technology, development and c... c... c... climate change) and Brave NewClimate (Do climate sceptics and anti nukes matter?) I have changed my mind again. In general nuclear is not cheaper than coal unless extra costs such as a carbon tax are (in the future) added to coal.

our energy rich future

The importance of numbers, from John McCarthy's sustainability of human progress site

The fission of an atom of uranium liberates about 10 million times as much energy as does the combustion of an atom of carbon from coal. I fear that to many people, the impression made by saying 10 million is about the same as if I had said 10 thousand or 10 billion.

One cannot understand policy issues without taking numbers seriously. If the number were 10 thousand, we probably could not afford nuclear energy. If the number were 10 billion, there would be no need for a significant uranium mining industry, and the waste problem would be trivial.

In another part of his site McCarthy quotes figures from Bernard Cohen demonstrating that nuclear energy can supply human needs for billions of years into the future. Although there is no reference to Bartlett type exponential growth here (which is not maintained in real life indefinitely, anyway) the calculations do demonstrate that there is no scientific reason to fear an energy deprived future.

david mackay: do the arithmetic

John McCarthy: He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense. (Progress and its Sustainability)

I'd forgotten a lot of my basic physics, so here is a refresher.

Power is the rate of energy conversion, or, the rate of doing work. This applies to both mechanical power, measured in joules / sec and electrical power, measured in watts

Work is done when a force is moved through a distance (W=F*D)

Mechanical force = mass * acceleration, the UNITS are kg.metre/sec/sec or Newtons
Mechanical work = force * distance, the UNITS are newton.metres or N.m or Joules
Mechanical power is work divided by time, or, Work / time, the UNITS are N.m /s or Joules / sec

Electrical power is measured in Watts. 1 Watt = 1 Joule / sec. A watt is also a volt.amp. Watts= Volts * amps

To obtain electrical energy then multiply the power * time. The UNITS here could be joules or watt.seconds. The normal units for larger amounts of electrical energy are KW.hrs. To convert watts to kilowatts divide by 1000, to convert seconds to hours divide by 3600 or 60*60.

We need to have an internalised way of having a feel for these values. A joule is the energy or work required to lift a small apple one meter straight up. If you perform that action in one second then that is equivalent to a watt or joule/sec of electrical power.

The small apple weighs 0.1 kg
The acceleration caused by the earth's gravity is roughly 10 m/sec/sec (9.8 m/s/s more accurately)
The distance we move the apple through is 1 metre
Work = force * distance
Work = mass * acceleration * distance
Work = 0.1 * 10 * 1
Work = 1 joule or 1 Newton.metre or 1 kg. metre ^2 / sec ^2, where ^2 means squared

Some other joule practical examples at the wikipedia joule page

A 40 watt incandescent light bulb produces forty joules of energy per second or the equivalent of lifting 4kg of apples 1 metre in one second. Fluorescent or LED lights achieve a similar effect with much less energy.

How much energy does a 40 watt incandescent light bulb use in one day?
40 * 24 / 1000 = 1 KW.hr energy used in one day

How much energy does the average person in an industrialised country use? The figures here are for the UK

Answer: The equivalent of 125 of these light bulbs running all the time

How many wind turbines would it require to meet the energy needs of everyone in the UK?
Answer = 600,000, which would cover half of the UK. The UK currently has 2408 wind turbines

How many nuclear power stations would it require to meet the energy needs of everyone in the UK?
Answer = 300. The UK currently has 10 nuclear power stations.

Here is a video from David MacKay illustrating the need to do the arithmetic. Irrespective of whether you are an alarmist, denier or somewhere in between you still need to do the arithmetic and basic physics to intelligently discuss these issues:

David MacKay is the author of Sustainable energy - without the hot air. He has recently been appointed the UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change Chief Scientific Advisor.

thoughts on the nuclear debate

Debate: "Should we consider Nuclear Power as a response to climate change?"

Affirmative:

Professor Barry Brook, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, University of Adelaide, and author of the blog Brave New Climate

Tom Blees, President, Science Council for Global Initiatives and author of the book "Prescription for the Planet."

For the Negative:

David Noonan, Australian Conservation Foundation

Dr Mark Diesendorf, Deputy Director, Institute of Environmental Studies, University of New South Wales".

I bought Tom Blee's book Prescription for the Planet. Tom was a very effective presenter due to his extensive research and personal contact with a wide range of people deeply involved in these issues allowed him to communicate telling and interesting anecdotes - and he has a wicked sense of humour, which was much needed on the night

The majority of the audience was anti nuclear (2/3rds or 3/4) but thanks to the work done by Barry Brook on his blog, Brave New Climate, there was a significant pro nuclear presence

Mark Diesendorf was energetically aggressive in his attack on nuclear power as an "idealistic fantasy". He argued that renewables could completely replace fossil fuels by 2030 and presented a slide showing the growth of various renewables illustrating how this could be done.

I felt this slide was dodgy but didn't know enough to refute it. Mark also made a big issue of his expertise and criticised Barry for pronouncing outside his field of primary expertise.

Aspects of this slide were challenged by Barry Brook. How could geothermal grow so quickly when on another slide Mark had shown geothermal at the R&D stage in Australia and that new technologies took 40 years or so to reach large scale commercial stage. Mark had used this to argue that IFR (Integral Fast Reactors) was pie in the sky, so Barry's counter was quite effective.

There was other to and fro along these lines, some of it amusing. Barry pointed out that renewables only made up 1% of the world's energy. Mark responded that it was unfair to take a world average because some European countries had a much higher percentage. But Mark had earlier criticised Tom Blee's example of ineffective solar panels in Germany as "cherry picking" because Germany had a cold climate. This sort of exchange confirmed my belief that you need to have a firm grasp of the arithmetic to engage intelligently in this debate. I've read this page (Renewable energy cannot sustain an energy intensive society) of Barry's site and downloaded Ted Trainer's pdf from that page to improve my own knowledge here

David and Mark were unreasonably dogmatic in their anti-IFR stance. The issue of urgency was used in an irrational way, given the reality of the failure in Copenhagen and the certainty of developing countries like China and India to continue using massive amounts of fossil fuels. Even if IFR does take 50 years to develop on a large scale (in itself debatable) then that is not a reason not to develop it. There is a can do and a can't do mentality and wrt IFR their attitude was totally can't do on technical grounds alone. They want a total roadblock on nuclear power. They spent quite a bit of time on this, irrespective of their other objections.

Barry took a realistic economic approach that coal would not be replaced by alternatives until a cheaper alternative emerged - and the best shot for that was nuclear.

Mark disputed that but admitted that his renewable futures would be more expensive. For me this was the real "idealistic fantasy", his repeated statement along the lines that people power would convince governments to change.

The other main objection from the anti-nuclear side was proliferation. What emerged here was that IFR reactors do not produce weapons grade plutonium and there are other more effective means of producing weapons grade plutonium, such as high-speed centrifuge technology. I felt the pro-nuclear side was on shakier ground here since more IFR reactors will lead to more transport around the world of weapons grade plutonium (as a start up fuel) and so the probability of it falling into the hands of terrorists will probably increase.

Mark said that nuclear power was 14% of the world's electricity production and declining. Barry offered a bet that the nuclear percentage would increase but Mark declined to accept it. Good move, Barry!

So, it boiled down to who was living in the "real world" and who was living in "fantasy world"

scratch challenges update

Numbers 12-14 are new. Scratch is a free download

1) Use the Letter shapes to write your first name on the page. Then introduce some special effects such as making the letters wobble and change their appearance.

2) Point, click and move
Make an object both point and glide towards the mouse position when you click on the stage
Hint: Motion > point towards
Hint: Sensing > mouse down?

3) Make Dan or Anjuli or Cassy or ballerina dance to a beat, using all of their dance shapes. Include a suitable background that changes colours as the lights flash.

4a) Make two animals have a forwards and backwards conversation
Hint: Use broadcast, (ask for help if you don’t know how broadcast works)
4b) Make it an interesting conversation with each animal speaking at least 3 times and making gestures too

5) Make a sprite gradually grow in size and then shrink

6) Make 2 different balls move around on the stage
a) the first ball moves in straight lines but bounces randomly whenever it hits the edge
b) the second moves randomly, gliding from one position to a new random position continually

7a) One sprite chases another sprite around the stage. The first sprite moves in straight line but bounces off the edge randomly. The chasing sprite chases the first sprite but is moving slower.
b) Extension – if the chasing sprite catches the other sprite then it says something sensible and makes a suitable sound

8a) Play all the different drum sounds automatically
Hint: create a variable for the drum number
b) Extension – keep recycling through all the drum sounds automatically

9a) Count down on a timer. A rocket takes off when you reach zero
Hint: Use the number icons in the letters folder
9b) Your rocket has pulsating exhaust and disappears at the top of the screen

10) Add, multiply or subtract two variable numbers
Hint: Just to do addition only you will need 4 variables: firstNum, secondNum, answer (computer calculated) and myAnswer (human calculated)

11) Variable coloured squares
a) Write a script that can draw a square of any size
Hint: Make a variable for the side length
b) Use the variable square script to draw a series of square with variable sides, with a single click
c) Now add variable pen colour and pen shade to the variable square script and use it to draw a variety of different coloured squares, with a single click

12) Draw lines of random thickness in random directions with random colours. The pen must be lifted up and moved for each new line.
Hint: pen group contains set pen color, set pen size, pen up, pen down
Hint: colours range across the spectrum (ROY G BIV) starting with red = 0. There are about 190 colours in total and you need to display them all!

13A) Make a race
a) choose two suitable sprites, they must have at least 2 costumes to simulate motion
b) the sprites move at random speeds, you can’t predict the winner
c) make a finish line, using a new sprite is best
d) suitable background music
e) when the winner crosses the finish line it announces that it won
f) reset scripts to start again

13B) Extension: Make it a multi-lap race, the number of laps can vary
g) make a variable to set and count the laps (use this on just one of the sprites otherwise you will be counting the laps twice)
h) use “x position” with an if tile rather than “if on edge bounce” to manage the turning and lap increase value
i) hide the finish line so that it only appears for the final lap

14A) Play the scales on a piano
a) Check out the sound > play note tile
b) Teacher has supplies a graphic of a keyboard. Import it to your scratch project.
c) Program the computer keyboard so that it plays a series of notes on the piano keyboard
d) As the notes are played alter the keyboard graphic to make it appear they are being pressed and they revert back to blank when the key is released
e) Add some suitable background graphics

14B) Extension
f) As the notes are played a sprite dances to the tune created by the notes, ie. each note triggers a particular movement
g) The names of the notes are spoken by a new sprite as they are played
h) Find a way to play ALL the notes on the keyboard

We don't deserve this, Julia Gillard

source of graphic

OK, I spent 6 years or so teaching at a School in one of the most disadvantaged socio-economic areas in metropolitan Australia. And so I can empathise strongly with how teachers at that school would feel about the new Australian government MySchool site when they see how their low NAPLAN results (Paralowie) are prominently in RED when compared with ALL schools , even though the similar so called like school results are displayed in far lighter shades.

Just let me say that Paralowie had the most enlightened administration and the most creative teachers I have ever had the privilege to work with. Teachers who understood that the main source of educational disadvantage was socio-economic and worked very hard to turn things around for as many students as they could.

And guess what. It will be the same long after Julia Gilliard has left politics and has retired on her parliamentary pension to some upper class suburb somewhere.

Further reading: League Tables Increase Social Segregation and Inequality by Trevor Cobbold, pdf

Previous blog: sbs-insight: should-schools-test-results-be-made-public

Previous article:
OPTIMISM AND REALITY IN DISADVANTAGED SCHOOLS

More temperate but well researched blogs, even though I have no idea where Darcy gets the thought that Gillard and Rudd are well intentioned:
MySchool: Part I
MySchool: Part II

is it nuclear or newclear?

I like this approach to the global warming climate debate:

1) Rapid human economic development is good (not argued here) and inevitable (you aren't going to stop China, India etc. from developing)

2) The only valid alternative to fossil fuels for our energy needs is nuclear power. This is really a matter of doing the arithmetic. According to The Integral Fast Reactor – Summary for Policy Makers (IFR Summary article) , which is written from the POV of keeping CO2 under 450ppm, then we will need to produce 1 GWe per day of new clean power every single day for the next 25 years.

3) The integral fast reactor (IFR) is the safest and most efficient form of nuclear power about. It was invented by Charles Till in 1965 (Plentiful Energy and the IFR Story) who led a team which produced a small (non commercial) fast reactor which ran for 30 years without incident. Unfortunately, this program was shut down by Bill Clinton’s administration in 1994 for political reasons. In Congress, the main argument against (by John Kerry) was civilian nuclear proliferation (which I suppose is a valid concern today as well – although the end product of IFR is not suitable for weapon production I’m less certain about the fuel inputs, still researching)

4) So if you are a climate alarmist then you should support IFR (as James Hansen does, see Science Council for Global Initiatives)

5) If you are not an alarmist but support future human development then you should also support IFR, not so urgently but essential for the future.

There is a debate happening in Adelaide, Australia, this Friday presented by The Australian Solar Energy Society, Sustainable Populations Australia and The Zero Carbon Network, will see a debate on “Should we consider Nuclear Power as a response to climate change?” with Mark Diesendorf and Helen Caldicott for the negative and Barry Brook and Tom Blees for the affirmitive (The Nuclear Debate). I've booked a seat.

For more information about IFR do some reading from this page of Barry Brooks blog, Brave New Climate.

Tom Blees video, part 2 of 3:

"The poor are a goldmine"

Fattest hand is first in the till

Noel Pearson is a great, fearless writer who combines deep analysis with scathing, excoriating description. By now much of his analysis of how passive welfare makes things worse for aboriginal people has filtered through to mainstream consciousness. In the above article he elaborates on a misunderstood aspect of his analysis. The aboriginal industry is made up of people who benefit before any aboriginal person benefits. Although some elements of welfare are essential it can easily reach a point where the helpers are taking responsibility out of the hands of the recipients. Once this becomes a problem it is hard to undo because many of the helpers would then become unemployed. Pearson is much more in touch with this than I am and far more scathing.

After quoting African-American economist Thomas Sowell, "The poor are a goldmine", Noel Pearson goes onto illustrate how this aphorism applies to indigenous Australians:

The leviathan of government bureaucracies make the payday lenders, the drug dealers and sly grog sellers pale in comparison with their commandeering of the income streams that are nominally allocated to the indigenous poor on the ground ...

So the first problem is an age-old one of ever-pullulating bureaucracies: like maggots engorged on a roadside carcass, whenever there is a new budget line the frontline departments of government serve themselves first. This is the real Aboriginal industry ...

The second form of welfare - passive service delivery - was not understood at the time of our critique, and has little public policy understanding even today. When we say that a large part of our welfare problem is government service delivery, people do not understand what we mean. After all, service delivery is supposed to be what is needed. Aboriginal disadvantage supposedly needs to be fixed by more comprehensive and more co-ordinated service delivery.

This is how you end up with 400 service providers for just 1200 people.

Our point that indigenous passivity is very much a consequence of government service delivery has been completely lost to the debate on indigenous policy.

The problem is that essential and beneficial government service delivery is mixed up with a vast panoply of services that displaced Aboriginal individuals, families and communities taking up their own responsibilities.

What my opponents and sceptics from the Left have failed to understand is that when we talk about disempowerment being the singular and devastating feature of Aboriginal Australia, we mean that our people have had their responsibilities taken away from us. Responsibility is power. If we want our people to be empowered, then we need to take back the responsibilities that the welfare state has stripped away from us.

fascist regimes are undermined by the internet

I may no longer be able to say that Google does some evil.

XIAO QIANG, director, China Internet Project, University of California at Berkeley

XIAO QIANG: Well, this -- we really should put this context of the Google event in a larger context, which is, it's not Google vs. China. It's more Internet vs. the authoritarian regime, the Chinese authoritarian regime, because, fundamentally, the Internet is an enabler.

It's empowering people the capacity to organize information, to effectively use information, and also to work together, collaboration, and even mobilize collective actions.

From those point of view, Google's services and products are just, for those leading services, empowering people to do so. And the Chinese government fundamentally cannot live in peace with such empowering factor of technology. Therefore, they cannot live in peace with Google, period.

So, when the Internet is getting larger and larger in China, the Internet users are more and more politically active, and the political speeches have become more and more proactive, then the government has to intensify its censorship measure higher and higher degree, and then to the point that the company like a Google cannot take it any more. So, this is fundamentally an issue of China's government vs. Internet.

Whether Google is there or not, the story will continue.
- Google's Threats to Leave China Renew Censorship Concerns

The offical Google blog announcement: A New Approach to China

Ethan Zuckerman has a more detailed analysis: Four possible explanations for Google's big China move:

• Google decided to stop being evil
• Google retreated from a very tough market
• Google abandoned Chinese users
• Google is about to join the front lines of the anticensorship wars (very interesting)

ignoble award in economics

Real World Economics Review blog is running a competition for the ignoble award in economics:

With other learned professions entrusted with public confidence, such as medicine and engineering, it is inconceivable that their professional bodies would not at the very least censure members who had successfully persuaded governments and public opinion to ignore elementary safety measures, so causing epidemics and widespread building collapses.

To date, however, the world’s major economics associations have declined to censure the major facilitators of the GFC or even to publicly identify them. This silence, this indifference to causing human suffering, constitutes grave moral failure. It also gives license to economists to continue to indulge in axiom-happy behaviour. Nor has the economics establishment offered recognition to those economists who were not taken in by fads and fashion and whose competence, if listened to, would have prevented the collapse …

The nomination, evidence and final winners procedures are explained at the site.

Click here to see recent nominations with some comments / reasons. So far, nominations include Greenspan, Bernanke, Summers, Prescott, Fama, Stigler, Friedman, Scholes, Geithner, Sachs, Krugman, Samuelson, Stiglitz and Gordon Brown / Ed Balls

Real World Economics Review is a communal blog for alternative economists. See their About page for more detail, including pdf downloads of papers to recent journals.

the aftermath of financial crisis

What we can expect on average from historical precedents of severe financial crises:

• Real Housing Prices will drop by 35.5% and take 6 years to recover
• Equity Prices will drop by 55.9% and take 3.4 years to recover
• Unemployment will increase by 7% and take 4.8 years to recover
• GDP will drop by 9.3% and take 1.9 years to recover
• Real public debt will increase by 86% over 3 years

This is based on a historical study of 22 major banking crises in different countries for which data was available

Most of the crises in the study group were regional (with the exception of the Great Depression which was included). So the current crisis may be worse in this respect:

The global nature of the crisis will make it far more difficult for many countries to grow their way out through higher exports, or to smooth the consumption effects through foreign borrowing. In such circumstances, the recent lull in sovereign defaults is likely to come to an end. As Reinhart and Rogoff (2008b) highlight, defaults in emerging market economies tend to rise sharply when many countries are simultaneously experiencing domestic banking crises.

Source: The Aftermath of Financial Crisis by Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff

steve keen's 2010 prediction for the economy

Steve Keen's concludes his 2009 retrospective with a prediction for 2010:

My expectation is that, some time during 2010, the disconnect between the financial markets’ euphoric expectations and the hard reality of a deleveraging private sector will bring the optimism of both “born again Keynesian” neoclassical economists and the markets to an end. Growth will not resume once the stimulus packages are removed, since deleveraging will then assert itself in the absence of government stimulus. Falling debt will subtract from growth, as it once added to it, and unemployment will start to rise again.

I expect that governments will react to this as they did in 2009–by turning on the stimulus packages once more, while continuing to ignore the private debt levels that caused the crisis in the first place. They will “turn Japanese”, to coin a phrase–since this is the same thing the Japanese government has been doing for two decades since its Bubble Economy burst at the end of 1989.

This process may repeat itself two or three times before serious attention is finally turned to the Ponzi-dominated financial sector’s parasitic impact on the real economy. But for now, the parasites are clearly still in control of the host

Unique visitors to Keen's blog have increased from 15,000 to 50,000 per month during 2009. I'm one of the new ones.

Steve Keen is a prolific Australian economics writer and publishes most of his material, including his university course, on line, see Debunking Economics. He supports a Post Keynesian or Minsky analysis of the economy, that capitalism is a fragile system in its internal dynamic (Financial Instability). One aspect of Keen's work is that he connects Post Keynesian analysis to Marxist dialectical philosophy, arguing continuity between the ideas of Marx and the ideas of Minsky (The Minsky Thesis: Keynesian or Marxian?).

I have bought and am reading the mobipocket eBook version of Keen's book and have recently ordered a couple of books by Hyman Minsky (1919-1996), that have been recently republished in the light of the crisis:

• John Maynard Keynes: Hyman Minsky's influential reinterpretation of the Keynesian revolution
• Stabilizing an Unstable Economy

Goethe quote

Every school of thought is like a man who has talked to himself for a hundred years and is delighted with his own mind, however stupid it may be.
(J.W. Goethe, 1817, Principles of Natural Science)

From the Schools of Thought page of the History of Economic Thought site. I think that site is a very good starting point for serious economic study.

update (25th December): Here is a counter balancing quote, from the HET introduction page, also from Goethe

Somebody says: "Of no school I am part,
Never to living master lost my heart,
Nor any more can I be said
To have learned anything from the dead."
That statement - subject to appeal -
Means "I'm a self-made imbecile."
(J.W. Goethe, Den Originalen, 1812)

Paul Samuelson developed Frankenstein

Economist Paul Samuelson has just died (age 94) so there was some coverage about him on the PBS NewsHour (my favourite news source) tonight.

As part of my economic study I am currently acquiring an overview of the mainstream neo-classical schools (they argue amongst each other). I'm impressed by the History of Economic Thought website. They have a summary of the various schools of thought which is more coherent than wikipedia. Wikipedia is not bad but tends to be more muddled and padded than the HET site.

Anyway, according to the NewsHour interview with David Warsh, Paul Samuelson was one of the four most influential economists of the 20th Century, the others being John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman and Kenneth Arrow. (Late Economist Samuelson Bridged Math, Money). From what I've read Samuelson was very good at developing mathematical arguments to update and refine Keynesian type government interventions into the economy.

Given his importance what he said about the current crisis, at the start of it, is interesting:

PAUL SAMUELSON: I'm really very realistic about the mess that we are in. People compare it with the Great Depression. But the Wall Street shenanigans this time are much worse. And people like me, who lived through the Great Depression, as a young, budding, kind of bright economist, are in great demand because the other people don't have a clue as -- as to what this kind of situation is.

PAUL SOLMAN: Well, what did Wall Street do this time that it didn't do last time?

PAUL SAMUELSON: This is the first time ever that this happened after the -- and I have to use my words very carefully -- fiendish, Frankenstein monsters of financial engineering had been created, a lot of them at MIT, some of them by people like me.

And these are marvelous things which can be used to spread risks rationally, and, in that sense, reduce riskiness. But the Frankenstein part of the story is that they also are marvelous things, Samson-like, to blind you. You don't know what you're doing. All transparency disappears. What's happened this last eight years is an absolutely unnecessary thing.

neither an alarmist nor denier be

Richard Burton once when approached by a beggar quoted Shakespeare:

"Neither a borrower nor a lender be -Shakespeare"

The beggar responded:

"Get fucked - Henry Miller"

That's pretty close to how I feel about the global warming pretend debate.

James Hansen sounded convincing on Lateline when interviewed by fellow alarmist Tony Jones. When I watch a seemingly reasonable and well researched scientist like Hansen I start to think who am I to question this?

But then when I read a counter argument by Richard Lindzen, a qualified environmentalist, (The Climate Science isn't Settled) then I wonder why the ABC takes the easy path of having an alarmist interview another alarmist. Why don't they set up a real debate between Hansen and Lindzen?

The ABC has already decided on the truth and present us with a carefully massaged version

It is still best to be neither an alarmist nor a denier. I would describe myself as a lukewarmist. Perhaps I should set up a political party but lacking the stridency and certainty of those who are sure it would not receive many votes.

Lindzen:

The notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of the response of a single number, GATA, to a single forcing, CO2 (or solar forcing for that matter), represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate. Many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And all these examples involve phenomena that are dependent on the confluence of many factors.

Our perceptions of nature are similarly dragged back centuries so that the normal occasional occurrences of open water in summer over the North Pole, droughts, floods, hurricanes, sea-level variations, etc. are all taken as omens, portending doom due to our sinful ways (as epitomized by our carbon footprint). All of these phenomena depend on the confluence of multiple factors as well
- The Climate Science isn't Settled

Lindzen's argument conforms with my belief that sustainability, although in some cases maybe a desirable goal, is not a possible goal. There is no ideal climate for the earth, there has never been any long term stability in the earth's climate or anything else for that matter. The idea that we can achieve this is ludicrous.

Previous blogs about this:
the case for unsustainability
the left and right of global warming
the problem of too much bullshit

Chicago 10

This has been out for a couple of years but I only saw it recently on late night SBS documentaries.

It's a very smooth rendition of the Chicago 1968 Hoffman / Yippie / Black Panthers (Bobby Seale) trial

1968. I lived through that time and the anti Vietnam war street demos. It was a historical hinge point. This documentary perturbed me because I lived through somewhat similar events in Australia - the sometimes violent protests, trails and gaoling of draft resistors and demonstrators. I feel like saying you have to see this documentary to understand those times. Maybe that's true, I think it is, but if you didn't experience things like this then maybe you wouldn't understand it anyway - because 1968 was such a radical break from the past. If you don't understand what life was like before 1968 then is it possible to understand 1968?

On the one hand NLF flags in the Courtroom and on the hill. On the other hand the pro war voices trying to depict hippies as commies or stooges, which just didn't gel.

I've seen previous versions of the Chicago trial. The previous versions had a different focus - mainly on the gagging and chaining of Bobby Seale by Judge Hoffman.

This one was different and possibly overall more accurate. It presented the Yippies as the main players of protest and Bobby Seale as almost an afterthought. There was new footage in there for me. Ginsberg's bad poetry, Norman Mailer shots and much more.

Two forms of protest or "rage against the machine". The Yippies with fun and drugs, the Panthers far more serious and fight fire with fire. Back then I read their literature avidly trying to work out where I stood. Cleaver: Soul on Ice; Jerry Rubin: Do It! In the end I agreed with Timothy O'Leary (the LSD professor) when years later he was asked why he left the hippies, replied: "I never really like the hippies anyway" LOL

The judge makes all these terrible errors - like chaining up and gagging Seale who was demanding his constitutional right to defend himself. Everything operates on a more subtle level today

I think the struggle goes on but the forms of struggle vary immensely over the decades. The Yippies and the Panthers were very romantic and exciting and I can't escape those feeling when I watch that old footage.

my fake farewell speech

Due to various push and pull factors (one of them being the need to study political economy thoroughly) I am planning to take a whole year's leave in 2010. This got me thinking as to what I would say to my teaching colleagues at the inevitable staff meeting if I was retiring. I've watched all those other teachers retire and now it's (almost) my turn. Since I'm not I won't get to give the speech but here's a draft of some thoughts about it (short version). btw I'm a secondary teacher.

The life of the soldier has been described as long periods of boredom interspersed with short periods of terror.

aside: maybe the life of some students is more like that of the soldier than the teacher but these days more accurately described as long periods of boredom (as in "this is boring") punctuated by long periods of playing with their mobile phones. If I was to resort to uncharacteristic sarcasm then I might describe them as the you-twit-face generation (thanks rob!), the achievement of dynamic overlap of you tube, twitter and facebook.

At any rate, for the last cottage industry, teaching is the most contradictory of professions

There is:

• magic - the magic of a great lesson
• the almost magic of the almost great lesson - where after describing the wonders of the Hubble telescope penetrating the mysteries of the Universe, a student comes out the front, you think you have inspired him to ask a deep question, but instead s/he says "Can I go to the toilet?"
• discovery - the continual discovery of new learning ideas and new student personalities, in the final analysis teaching is a great privilege
• the need for courage - unexpected confrontation, sometimes serious, can and do strike from a clear blue sky. I didn't realise that Nietzsche was a teacher in a Disadvantaged school until I saw this quote: "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger"
• frustration and aggravation - aka the Department and their representatives
• attrition - in the end it wears you down

On the magic days it's the best job in the world. On the need for courage days you wonder why the hell am I doing this

Best story. At the end of an excursion one teacher explained to me that when she went to primary school in her class there was a cupboard labelled "teachers cupboard". She thought that at the end of the school day after the kids had gone home that the teacher got into her cupboard and waited there until the next day!

Best compliment. One student once nicknamed me the detective. I asked why and he said, "You never give up on a case"

(in house anecdotes left out)

Marx is thorough

It has been sitting on my bookshelf for 30+ years. Because of the economic crisis (not yet over), I finally got around to reading Part One of Capital by Karl Marx. It took me many hours. It demands the slow, deep thinking mode.

The thoroughness of Marx is very impressive. I think I now understand what an everyday commonplace commodity is and so I see the world in a different way. That's one thing that good thinkers do; they make you see the commonplace in a completely different way.

I hope it doesn't take others 30+ years to get around to it.

Dan Willingham's book

I was impressed earlier by some you tube videos and articles by Dan Willingham (some summaries here) so when I discovered that he had written a book I bought it

Why Don't Students Like School? A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions about how the Mind Works and What it means for the Classroom (2009)

From the Introduction:

Repetition is good for learning but terrible for motivation

This quote and book is a timely reminder for me that teaching is a complex balancing act, there is no one true way. Also, the claim that we have learnt "more about how the mind works in the last twenty-five years than we did in the previous twenty-five hundred" is credible. And Willingham makes a brave attempt of translating these discoveries into worthwhile "Implications for the Classroom" in every chapter.

So far I've read two chapters and skimmed the others. Below is a thumbnail of what each chapter discusses.

Chapter 1: Although we are naturally curious our minds aren't naturally good at thinking and often avoid thinking

Chapter 2: Background factual knowledge is essential for skill development (Content precedes process)

Chapter 3: Memory is the residue of thought. If we want students to remember things then work out a way for them to think about those things.

Chapter 4: Abstraction is hard. We understand new things in the context of things we already know and most of what we know is concrete knowledge.

Chapter 5: Expertise. Extended practice is essential to become proficient at a mental task.

Chapter 6: There are no short cuts to teaching expertise. Cognition early in training is very different from cognition later in training.

Chapter 7: Learning Styles. Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn.

Chapter 8: Slow learners. Children do differ in intelligence but intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work.

Chapter 9: Teachers. Teaching like any complex cognitive skill must be practiced to be improved.

The book title, Why Don't Students Like School?, is a little sensationalist. This book does contribute significantly to the answer of that question but the main point is better expressed in the long subtitle.