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Benefits tied to immunisation

30 November 2011 / Daniel Midgley / 5 Comments

Good news: the Australian government is now explicitly tying family tax benefits to whether children are immunised.

Parents who do not have their children fully immunised will be stripped of family tax benefits under a scheme announced by the Federal Government.

The Government says 11 per cent of five-year-olds are not immunised and has announced a shake-up of the system which will take effect from July 1 next year.

Under the changes, families who refuse vaccinations face losing up to $2,100 per child in benefits.

Children will need to have more vaccines, and younger.

Children will for the first time be required to receive vaccines for meningococcal C, pneumococcal and varicella (chicken pox).

A combination vaccine will replace individual doses of vaccine for measles, mumps, rubella and varicella (chicken pox) – which means children will be immunised against measles, mumps and rubella earlier, at 18 months instead of the current four years of age.

This will be great, as long as there are no easy exemptions to render the law toothless. Oh, wait.

What exemptions will be available for the new immunisation conditions linked to the Family Tax Benefit Part A supplement?

While the Government considers that immunisation is an important health measure for children and families, existing exemptions will continue to be available.

A child may have a temporary or permanent exemption if a recognised immunisation provider determines that receiving the vaccine is medically contraindicated. A child may also receive an exemption from the immunisation requirements if a recognised immunisation provider indicates that the parent has a conscientious objection to immunising their child.

This needs to be fixed. Even so, this might push a few more parents to immunise.

How to mark exam questions

26 November 2011 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

I’m in Exam Marking Hell. It’s not that bad, really — students come up with some interesting things to say sometimes, and that’s how you know it’s a good answer.

For others in a similar plight, I thought I’d share my marking scale. Marking exam questions is easy. All you have to do is put an answer into one of five bins, and the bins all have easy-to-distinguish characteristics.
– – – – –
SPECTACULAR
This answer is so good, I want to memorise bits of it and use them in a conversation later. Brings information about the topic together, and does it in an original way. Wow.

EXCELLENT
This answer has the facts straight, and says something smart and interesting about the topic. Is full of win.

ADEQUATE
While there’s nothing wrong about this answer, it’s flat and uninspired. It goes no farther than we did in lectures, and it even uses some of the same examples. A rehash.

LACKING
This answer is incomplete, gets things wrong, or misses the point completely.

RIDICULOUS
Almost comically wrong. It’s tempting to type these answers out and email them to other professors. The student is trying to bluff you, and failing.
– – – – –
The hard part is deciding what numbers should go with each category, but that’s why they pay us the big bucks.

She’s just a

23 November 2011 / Daniel Midgley / Comments Off

Is Michele Bachmann a lyin’-ass bitch? The Roots (of Jimmy Fallon fame) seem to think this is an appropriate assessment; the other night, they used the amazing Fishbone song of the same name to play her on.

But isn’t that a little harsh? Whether she’s a lyin’-ass bitch depends on whether she actually believes the insane things she says. If she sincerely believes them, then she’s a crazy, wrong-headed, god-soaked, log-stupid, vicious, callous, deluded, vaccine-denying, dangerous historical revisionist that has no business sitting on a local school board, much less voting in Congress or running for President of a major country.

But not a lyin’-ass bitch.

Well, she might be a bitch.

I’m just glad they played the song because I haven’t thought of it in ages.

Hey, why don’t we throw it on?

You will exercise your right to choose.

18 November 2011 / Daniel Midgley / 7 Comments

I’m a big fan of compulsory voting. And I’m not the only one. Here’s Lisa Hill, from the University of Adelaide.

The most decisive means for arresting turnout decline and closing the socioeconomic voting gap is mandatory voting: in fact, it is the only mechanism that can push turnout anywhere near 95 percent. Places with mandatory voting also have less wealth inequality, lower levels of political corruption and higher levels of satisfaction with the way democracy is working than voluntary systems. Here in Australia, where we love freedom as much as anyone else, we have a mandatory voting regime that is well managed, corruption-free, easy to access, cheap to run and has an approval rating of more than 70 percent.

And when everyone votes, the outcome is much less dependent on turnout. Electoral swings to this or that party aren’t flukes of turnout; they’re big changes in the overall national mood.

But if everyone votes, including low-information voters, doesn’t that just mean that everyone votes stupidly? That’s the view of Jason Brennan, who argues that — dear heaven! — too many people vote already.

The median voter is incompetent at politics. The citizens who abstain are, on average, even more incompetent. If we force everyone to vote, the electorate will become even more irrational and misinformed. The result: not only will the worse candidate on the ballot get a better shot at winning, but the candidates who make it on the ballot in the first place will be worse.

He doesn’t want a democracy. He wants a cabal of elites to make wise choices for everyone.

I once talked to an angry young man who made exactly this argument. I told him that he was a clever person, but (quoting Douglas Adams) “you make the same mistake a lot of clever people do of thinking everyone else is stupid.” Of course, some people are stupid, but there’s no reason to think that all the stupidity or ill-informedness is always located in one or the other party. The stupidity is likely to be somewhat evenly distributed. Random bad answers will be randomly distributed, and they’ll cancel each other out. And along the way, you’ve gotten input from as many people as you can. If we have to err, let it be on the side of more participation.

Anti-porn with Save the Source

15 November 2011 / Daniel Midgley / 1 Comment

Madge stumbled upon this flyer, and I had to go because I’m such a sucker for Word Art. Would you turn down an invite to an anti-porn lecture?

No, I didn’t think you would. Nor would about 20 other Perth Skeptics. The speaker had no idea what he was in for.

The sponsoring organisation was “Save the Source“. The “source” is men, or “johns” — they’re the source for all the money that goes to keep the “girls” enslaved in porn. Apparently. And just because the speaker (did anyone catch his name? I’ll have to call him Mr Source) wants to “save” men, this does not mean StS is a religious organisation. No, no. The similarity of his shtick to Judeo-Christian horseshit is purely coincidental.

Rather than describe the sight of Mr Source broken and worn down by logic, facts, and reason — yet still holding fast to his opinion! — I thought I’d present his talking points and arguments so that other can learn from the tactics of this spiritual quackery.

Some men are “addicted” to porn. This would be valid, if a valid definition of addiction were provided, which it never was.

Porn leads to prostitution. This makes no sense. Wouldn’t jacking off at home mean less employment for sex workers?

Porn leads to harder porn. The speaker imagined porn along a spectrum: A nude woman sitting in a chair on one end, and “bestiology” (his term) at the other. But this is by no means a given; it’s a slippery slope argument. Porn could be seen as a collection of genres, where people tend to gravitate toward the kinds of porn they like and leave the rest alone.

Porn leads to rape and violence. In fact, the FBI reports that rape and violence is down. Yet Mr Source claims that porn consumption is booming! How does that work?

Porn harms men. Well, asked someone, what if porn doesn’t harm a certain man? Then, says Mr Source, porn is still bad because it harms the women who act in it. What if (asked someone) a woman is is a porn film because she wants to be? For example, in amateur porn? Then it’s still bad, said Mr Source, because it harms the men who view it. This is circular reasoning. It took him a while to figure out why, but I think I got it through to him in the end.

Porn is a serious problem because he’s seen so many problems associated with it. This is actually two logical problems: confirmation bias — he notices people who have problems, but ignores people who quite enjoy porn. And if they enjoy porn, well, that’s a problem, too! Because he’s defining porn as a problem. This is begging the question, or assuming the antecedent.

Porn gives young men unrealistic expectations about what sexual acts girls ought to be doing. This may be true — inexperienced guys may have unrealistic expectations — until a girl stands up to him and tells him. But this is true for any set of expectations we might have, no matter our age or gender.

One thread that came up over and over again is that women are vessels of purity that must remain pure and unsullied, while men are the drivers of the process — the “source” of the money. Does he know that women look at porn? He does now — the audience saw to that.

In short, Mr Source wasn’t terribly concerned about any empirical work showing the downsides of porn, or using reason or logic. Instead, he chose to argue from his own personal preferences, saying that porn is bad because he knows porn is bad.

I’m a father of two teenage boys, and I’m sure that they are either looking at porn, or they will. When they do, my hope is that they’ll be able to come to me with questions or ask for information, like they already do about sex. I don’t want them to be laden down with guilt and shame about it — guilt and shame that is promoted by people like Mr Source, and converted into money for his courses and workshops.

Shape Type

12 November 2011 / Daniel Midgley / 6 Comments

The makers of Kerntype have made another typographic game: Shape Type.

When you’re making a font in a digital program like Fontographer, you spend a lot of time pulling the handles of Bézier control points around, trying to massage curves into a plausible letter shape. So can you drag the big pink circles to make a letter that looks good?

This one’s a bit harder than Kerntype — I managed an 86. Beat that, I dares ya.

The yearly War on Christmas email from my family

9 November 2011 / Daniel Midgley / 10 Comments

A family member has sent this rather long and well-circulated email.

Apparently the White House referred to Christmas Trees as Holiday Trees for the first time this year which prompted CBS presenter, Ben Stein, to present this piece which I would like to share with you. I think it applies just as much to many countries as it does to America .

The following was written by Ben Stein and recited by him on CBS Sunday Morning Commentary.

My confession:

I am a Jew, and every single one of my ancestors was Jewish. And it does not bother me even a little bit when people call those beautiful lit up, bejeweled trees, Christmas trees. I don’t feel threatened. I don’t feel discriminated against. That’s what they are, Christmas trees.

It doesn’t bother me a bit when people say, ‘Merry Christmas’ to me. I don’t think they are slighting me or getting ready to put me in a ghetto. In fact, I kind of like it. It shows that we are all brothers and sisters celebrating this happy time of year. It doesn’t bother me at all that there is a manger scene on display at a key intersection near my beach house in Malibu. If people want a creche, it’s just as fine with me as is the Menorah a few hundred yards away.

I don’t like getting pushed around for being a Jew, and I don’t think Christians like getting pushed around for being Christians. I think people who believe in God are sick and tired of getting pushed around, period. I have no idea where the concept came from, that America is an explicitly atheist country. I can’t find it in the Constitution and I don’t like it being shoved down my throat.

Or maybe I can put it another way: where did the idea come from that we should worship celebrities and we aren’t allowed to worship God ? I guess that’s a sign that I’m getting old, too. But there are a lot of us who are wondering where these celebrities came from and where the America we knew went to.
– – – – –
In light of the many jokes we send to one another for a laugh, this is a little different: This is not intended to be a joke; it’s not funny, it’s intended to get you thinking.

Billy Graham’s daughter was interviewed on the Early Show and Jane Clayson asked her ‘How could God let something like this happen?’ (regarding Hurricane Katrina).. Anne Graham gave an extremely profound and insightful response. She said, ‘I believe God is deeply saddened by this, just as we are, but for years we’ve been telling God to get out of our schools, to get out of our government and to get out of our lives. And being the gentleman He is, I believe He has calmly backed out. How can we expect God to give us His blessing and His protection if we demand He leave us alone?’

In light of recent events… terrorists attack, school shootings, etc. I think it started when Madeleine Murray O’Hare (she was murdered, her body found a few years ago) complained she didn’t want prayer in our schools, and we said OK. Then someone said you better not read the Bible in school. The Bible says thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal, and love your neighbor as yourself. And we said OK.

Then Dr. Benjamin Spock said we shouldn’t spank our children when they misbehave, because their little personalities would be warped and we might damage their self-esteem (Dr. Spock’s son committed suicide). We said an expert should know what he’s talking about. And we said okay.

Now we’re asking ourselves why our children have no conscience, why they don’t know right from wrong, and why it doesn’t bother them to kill strangers, their classmates, and themselves.

Probably, if we think about it long and hard enough, we can figure it out. I think it has a great deal to do with ‘WE REAP WHAT WE SOW.’

Funny how simple it is for people to trash God and then wonder why the world’s going to hell. Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says. Funny how you can send ‘jokes’ through e-mail and they spread like wildfire, but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing. Funny how lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene articles pass freely through cyberspace, but public discussion of God is suppressed in the school and workplace.

Are you laughing yet?

Funny how we can be more worried about what other people think of us than what God thinks of us.

Pass it on if you think it has merit.

If not, then just discard it…. no one will know you did. But, if you discard this thought process, don’t sit back and complain about what bad shape the world is in.

My Best Regards, Honestly and respectfully,

Ben Stein

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
I sent this back:

As the atheist of the family, I thought I’d respond.

There seems to be some idea floating around that atheists hate Christmas and want to stop it. Well, that’s just silly. I love Christmas! In fact, for the last ten years, I’ve been in a choir that puts on a big Christmas show. (Some of the other singers are atheists, and they like Christmas too.) I’ve got most of Handel’s Messiah memorised, and when we do “Angels We Have Heard on High”, I can belt out a lusty “Glo-ria” with the best of them. I don’t believe the story, but I keep singing at Christmas because I like the music. I like the lights, and the food, and being with family, just like everyone does.

What I don’t like, however, is compulsory worship. Christians like their religion, and that’s fine. But I don’t like how some Christians have decided that schools are the place where they want this part of the culture war to play out. I hope nobody I’m writing to thinks this, but maybe someone thinks that prayer in school is a pretty good idea. So here’s a thought experiment.

Imagine your school district announced that, starting tomorrow, everyone was going to have Muslim prayers to Allah. If you’re thinking, “Gee, I don’t know if I’d feel very comfortable with that,” well, that’s about how an atheist feels. And that’s not just because atheists don’t want to have prayers to Allah in school (although that’s true). It’s also because we think public schools ought to be neutral on the subject of religion. That way, the children of Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Wiccans, Mormons, and (yes) atheists all get a level playing field. No one’s religion is promoted at the expense of anyone else’s. Sounds fair to me. And by doing it that way, schools are obeying the Constitution, which is the law of the land.

If people (including Ben Stein) are concerned that there isn’t enough religion in society, then I have some good news: there are already buildings for teaching religion, and they’re called churches. They’re very nice, they’re already built, and you can choose exactly which kind you like. (And they’re tax-free, because tax-payers are compelled to pick up the financial burden for churches, even wealthy ones, whether they want to or not.) Worshipping at home is also a very good option.

I don’t know if I really needed to write this. I actually think that most Christians are smarter and more fair-minded than the person who wrote the latter half of the email (and it wasn’t Ben Stein). The idea that God is going to allow the nation to be smitten with horrible disasters unless enough non-believers are compelled to grovel before him against their will is, fortunately, not an idea that I have seen too many Christians get behind. But here it is, just in case.

Comments welcome.

Love,
Daniel

I sort of like “The One”.

5 November 2011 / Daniel Midgley / 5 Comments

If you’re not in Australia, you may not have heard of “The One“. It’s a TV programme on Seven, which attempts to find Australia’s best psychic. This is sort of like trying to find Australia’s healthiest cadaver.

I’ve only seen one episode — the psychics try to divine the famous owners of sporting equipment, find a boy in an underground tunnel system (without going underground), and pick out the fake fencer out of a group of six.

Can we have them take the masks off? I’m having trouble cold-reading them.

At first, I was expecting to hate it. The fact that there’s an industry of charlatans (and a culture of people that believes them) drives me nuts. Also, it seems wrong that someone will win the title of “best psychic” even if they do no better than random chance, just by outlasting the other contestants. And it was painful to see all the contestants — deluded people (at best) convinced that they had Teh Powerz. But I ended up really enjoying it, and here’s why.

First off, there’s a “skeptical judge”, Richard Saunders, who keeps things on track. At first, I was worried that he was being played by the format, and lending credibility to the silly newage nonsense. And in fact, he does make noises about being sometimes “intrigued, but not convinced”. But there’s nothing wrong with staying open minded; that’s one of the things about being a skeptic. He certainly does a better job than I would. I’d be making catcalls and rolling my eyes. He’s much nicer than I am, and he explains random chance and probability, to the annoyance of the “gullible judge”. (She’s suitably woolly-headed.)

It’s also fun to watch the contestants make ad hoc justifications for each new failure. Will the psychic-believing viewers start to notice the constant dissembling? It seems unbelievable to me that someone at home wouldn’t become more skeptical after watching excuse after excuse, though that might be offset by seeing the occasional random hit.

The thing I’m most glad about, though: While the show does give a forum to psychics, it’s also promoting the idea that it’s good to test paranormal claims in a somewhat controlled way. Does “The One” do this ideally? Probably not, but I’m glad someone’s doing it at all. Even though it’s meant to promote psychics and the paranormal sub-culture, it inadvertently sets them up so they can fail publicly, again and again.

Prescriptivism with attitude

3 November 2011 / Daniel Midgley / 3 Comments

A graphic from Facebook. Honestly, some people get so touchy about correct usage.

Better do what they say, though. Looks like the writer of this has been driven to the brink by one too many “your”s. One more dropped apostrophe, and they might snap.