In the papers today

In The Age today, some straight talk against late term abortions from a woman who would appear to be of feminist inclination (yay).

In the Sydney Morning Herald, Mem Fox takes on the phonics/whole language debate and seems to side strongly with whole language. I am not sure she makes a well argued case. For example:

"Parents often make the understandable mistake of believing that phonically sounding out words is reading. But we do most of our reading in silence: the meaning is on the page, not in the sound.... Is it necessary to have a grasp of phonics in order to be able to read? Broadly speaking, the astonishing and contentious answer is no, otherwise we wouldn't be able to read silently;"

This is a bit of a reach, isn't it? I thought the point of phonics was the assistance it gives to children (or adults) learning to pronounce a new word. The fact that you may not rely on it much as an experienced reader is neither here nor there to debate on education in primary schools.

She does make one valid point, in that she points out that languages based on pictographs don't use phonics at all. However, although Japan, for example, claims a very high literacy rate, I believe it does have the downside that it takes many years of school before they can read newspapers or similar "adult" material with full comprehension, because of the rate it takes to learn the couple of thousand pictographs that are necessary.

Her main argument seems to be against going back to a phonics only system of teaching. But is that really the likely outcome of the current federal government inquiry into literacy teaching? If the report simply wants all teachers to be able to effectively teach phonics to those student who benefit from that approach, it may not necessarily mean whole language is completely out the window. The current problem may be that some teachers may be too wedded to whole language.

And even it if did recommend going back to phonics only, if the empirical evidence is that literacy levels overall were better under that system, what is the point of insisting on whole language or a combined system being best?

To further confuse the argument, Mem then ends up with this:

"Phonics comes into its own as soon as children begin to learn to write. Josie is now courageously struggling to write. She has to match the sounds of language to the letters she scrawls across a page. During the complex battle between her brain and her hand she's now coming to grips with phonics and spelling. Those people who argue for an exclusively phonics approach in reading misunderstand what phonics is and forget how absolutely fundamental it is in learning to write."

Huh? Suddenly sounds like a bit of an argument for phonics to get more emphasis. I don't see her point here.

That Josie, by the way, is an acquaintance of hers who at age 3 can "read anything from atlases to adult books on dream interpretation."

Just what we need, more 3 year olds with a deep understanding of dream interpretation!

Mem obviously has a fair bit of sympathy for whole language, and I guess it may work well for some. The debate is more about those it doesn't work well for. Mem fails to approach the issue in this article with any empirical stuff at all.

She also had a few meetings with Mark Latham and seems to have liked him quite a lot. Maybe that says a lot about her judgment too.

Able Danger rollercoaster

The Able Danger story in the States, which is also relevant to Mark Steyn's defence against last week's Media Watch story, seems to have more twists to it than your average corkscrew rollercoaster.

What impresses me a lot, though, is the rapid willingness of LGF and the other right wing sites to admit that it is looking like the allegation against the 9-11 commission may be a lot less than it first seemed.

Even if the allegation proves unreliable, Mark Steyn's point in this article (that it is still entirely possible for Atta to have been in the States prior to June 2000) seems solid. However, Mark seems to be much less emphatic about the veracity of the Florida story than before, saying that Atta "might [my italics] have been in Florida, attempting to get a U.S. Farm Service Agency loan for the world's biggest cropduster, as reported by USDA official Johnell Bryant."

He's a great read anyway, even if the Florida stories were to be debunked.

Peculiar plane crash

Guess you don't need me to tell you, but the plane crash in Greece earlier today is mighty peculiar. Obviously, a problem with the air is at the core of the disaster, but reports are that people were moving in the cockpit long after the problem started, and the passengers had their emergency oxygen masks on.

Surely then there were some flight attendants still able to work out what to do with the (presumably) incapacitated pilots. I mean, even if the cockpit crew all passed out due to an undetected or sudden air leak (which is rather puzzling in itself), obviously someone in the aircraft activated the emergency oxygen in time to keep some people alive. (Or is it automatic at a certain level of depressurisation?) If an attendant was alive, why couldn't they revive the pilots (or at least, taken the controls for a time and stopped a descent into a mountain?) I wonder if flight attendants all know how to use the radio in an emergency. Surely they would have to be taught?

Maybe flight attendants and the cockpit crew all passed out and it was only passengers moving around wondering what to do. Again, you would think shoving some of oxygen on an attendant would have revived one, and couldn't a passenger fly the plane at a steady, low altitude until someone could make radio contact?

If it all happened in a short space of time, it would be more understandable. But it seems to have taken place over a considerable time.

Oh well, guess we will know eventually.

A Test Post about fonts

I have used firefox ever since I started this blog, and found that using the "normal" size font for posts looked really big, so I got into the habit of making all of them "small".

For the first time today, I looked at my blog with IE, and found the font was really uncomfortably small.

Other sites don't seem to have much difference between IE and Firefox, but then most people use additional software that I haven't investigated yet.

Oh well, sorry to any IE user who has had a problem with my font.

Hold, whip and return

Just as Australia starts taking a softer approach to its detention centres, a news story from the Jakarta Post says that Malaysia has this year taken to flogging illegal immigrants, and has no plans on changing this policy any time soon:

"KUALA LUMPUR (AP): Despite increasingly congested detention centers, Malaysia will not deport illegal immigrants immediately, but will stick with its policy of sending them to trial and sentencing them to the lash, the home minister was quoted as saying on Sunday.

"If they are charged and then punished with whipping, they would think many times before running the risk of re-entering the country," Home Minister Azmi Khalid was quoted as saying by the national news agency Bernama.

More than 9,000 illegals, mostly Indonesians, are being held at the centers throughout the country as they await their trials to start or be completed, according to Azmi.

"This is due to delays in the legal process," Azmi was quoted as saying by the Berita Minggu newspaper. "The cases drag on (sometimes for more than a year) due to many postponements, whereas illegal immigrants are caught almost every day."

Azmi said congestion in detention centers will worsen as the government steps up the operation to round up illegals by empowering civilian volunteers - besides police and immigration officers - to detain them.

Whipping was introduced as a punishment for illegal immigrants as part of a crackdown launched in March 2005."

I had not heard of this in the Australian media, but maybe I missed it.

Puts our treatment of such people in some sort of perspective, doesn't it.

Aboriginal woes

A detailed bad news story here about chronic aboriginal problems (petrol sniffing, sexual assault, lawlessness, etc) in the community near Uluru, despite a steady stream of income from the tourists. Part of the problem (I guess) is that the money comes without much (or any?) effort from most in the community.

I had never heard this before:

"Some community members bought cars "like tennis shoes", dumping them in what he called a "World Heritage Car Dump" within sight of Uluru when they broke down.

"I counted about 1000 cars there – that's about $4 million ... of money that has potentially been wasted," he said."

Meanwhile, this week's Phillip Adams' Late Night Live radio show has been up in Arnhem Land doing tedious reports on the Garma festival, an annual event which has previously escaped my attention. If I can believe Phil, it would seem that the communities up there are much healthier than the ones further south. Maybe it has something to do with being nearer to a big city, and having some decent natural resources to live off. Anyway Phil, rather than rubbing shoulders with the relatively successful, and their white groupies, why not do a week from the Uluru community and help them workshop ideas to get out of their appalling mess?

Euthanasia in practice

This item didn't seem to get much attention in the Australian media, but is interesting nonetheless.

It's about a recent study that indicates there were well over a thousand cases of euthanasia actually administered in a year in the Netherlands. (Country population: about 16.5 million; still seems a lot to me.)

A few points of interest:

"Project leader Bregje Onwuteaka-Philipsen said she was surprised that "the most important reasons for doing the request are not strictly medical." The survey asked physicians the reasons that patients sought help in ending their own lives, with the most frequent being pointless suffering, loss of dignity and weakness.

In cases in which doctors denied the requests, the most common reasons were not wanting to be a burden on their family, tired of living and depression.

Well, Australia's scientist/ aboriginal adviser/death-loving creepy doctor Philip Nitschke wouldn't have any such doubts and must think it is a stupid law then, if he can't help people who are just old from topping themselves.

"Under a law that took effect in 2002, euthanasia is restricted to terminal patients suffering unbearable pain with no hope of improvement, and who request to die when they are of sound mind. Each case is reviewed by a panel of medical experts."

The study also reportst that 13 % of those who requested euthanasia changed their minds.

The report continues:

"But in a critical accompanying editorial, University of Minnesota law professor Susan Wolf said the important question is whether mercy killings are taking place that do not follow the strict guidelines the Dutch have put in place.

The study could not determine that, she said, because doctors self-reported on whether their efforts complied with Dutch rules, among other reasons.

"The ultimate question remains — if you permit physicians to take life deliberately by assisting suicide or performing euthanasia, can you control the practice? Can you keep it within agreed boundaries? ... We do not yet know the answers," "

If I can't trust my hospital doctor to wash his or her hands, I am not sure I should trust them with this either.

Moon tourism and other space stuff

Interesting news about possible commercial trips around the moon, coming soon to you for $100,000,000. That's a lot of money for a holiday that offers the potential danger of death from solar flare.

But then again, maybe if the spacecraft is thickened up a bit from the average density of the old Apollo craft, maybe death is avoidable. This interesting article (from NASA, so maybe it is more optimistic than it should be) indicates that the Apollo command module would have given a fair degree of shielding. Maybe the real concern during Apollo was for the astronauts if they were caught on the moon during a flare. I am sure the Lunar Module would have offered pretty pitiful shielding, as there was not much to it.

I also found this nice little site about the possible replacements for the Shuttle. The little rocket based on the shuttle solid rocket booster looks very neat, and I don't think even I would have much worry about riding a solid rocket. From what I gather, they are pretty damn simple devices, and don't tend to blow up. Unfortunately, looks like you still need a liquid fueled second stage too. D'oh...

On education..

Seems to have been a pretty quiet week in the world of blogging. At least in the bit of it I check regularly.

However, an opinion piece in The Age caught my attention. The writer, one Neil Hooley from the academia of education, talks about how being teachers forced by the terrible Federal government to use a simple scale to rank children's achievements is "letting the kids down".

"Apparently, parents are confused by other terminology that might use words such as "established", "consolidated", "developed" and the like. A grade of B, for example, is very explicit and everyone knows what it means."

Well, yeah. But in the world of education, nothing can be allowed to be so clear:

"We have a distinct choice here. Either it is appropriate to draw up an absolute scale that measures achievement, or we look at progress that has been made over time. In the former case, the context is really unimportant - all that matters is product at the time. Contrast this with the latter case, where the conditions are crucial and really shape what is achieved."

Here we go:

"The allocation of absolute grades to the learning of children fits into a particular logic of knowledge. This says that schools are involved in the passing on of predetermined information or subject content that can be known, taught, assessed and rated accurately at each age or year level. Under this arrangement, the logic is internally consistent and defensible. There trouble is, there is another logic.

An alternative view indicates that children learn by building their own knowledge and that learning is always a work in progress."

Fair enough. The problem comes with the next sentence in that paragraph:

"Under these conditions, it is highly problematic whether predetermined content can be known, taught, assessed and rated accurately. With this logic, a graded system of assessment is therefore entirely inconsistent and indefensible."

Why? Every sensible person agrees that it is good for an education system to encourage students to "build their own knowledge" and realise that you can go through life continually learning, if you want to. But why should that preclude being able to give a simple assessment of where the student is in their level of objective knowledge of a subject at any particular time?

Surely he is getting at something more subtle, and it would seem to be the lingering postmodernist idea that, at heart, there is no objective truth about anything. No point in testing kids for how much they remember or understand it then. Go on, admit it Hooley!

His ending is particularly silly:

"An imposed system of A to E labels assumes one logic. It assumes that schools are only about the passing on of knowledge from elsewhere, that both teachers and children are disconnected from their knowledge and that imposed external judgments are accurate and necessary.

Parents will make up their own minds, but children may have little option to do so, locked in the iron cage of A to E determinism."

Look, if teachers want to comment on a student's "progress over time" or general aptitude etc, can't they still do it in the way they always have (at least in primary school)? That is, little Johnny gets a C in maths, but teacher writes at the end of the report card that "Johnny could do better with increased effort" or "Johnny has improved considerably, but further effort should see better results." Damn simple, it you ask me. At high school level, you can test in other ways about general aptitude and combine it with the other testing of stuff learnt to get a general idea of a kid's potential.

And it is absolute rubbish to suggest students are going to be "trapped" by their school grades anyway. Surely everyone knows of fellow high school students who didn't do well there, but after a few years maturing have gone back to study properly and ended up with tertiary qualifications and well paying careers.

Oh,and he also starts by criticising the government not (he believes) allowing the aboriginal flag to be used at schools instead of the Australian flag. Yes indeed, I am sure the lack of that flag must account for so much of the educational difficulties in aboriginal society.

Relativistic Poverty

Peter Saunders makes a lot of sense in his continuing attack on the welfare lobby (and Left generally) insisting on defining "poverty" in a relative sense.

Funnily enough, one of the comments posted after the article says this:

"The thing that Saunders does not understand is that in wealthy societies where there is no starvation or dying from exposure, poverty is about being unable to participate in the society with respect and esteem.

A relativistic definition of poverty is not adopted by ‘the left’ just so they can advocate redistribution of income. It is favoured because it is the only real way of understanding what it means to be poor. If parents cannot afford Nike trainers for their child, the child ‘feels’ poor. The lack of money for trendy shoes ‘means’ poverty in our society."

What to make of this post? Surely she can't be saying that it reflects good, sensible values to say that children have a right to have the "coolest" brand names rather than simply a reasonable quality shoe? If she saying that, it plays exactly into Saunder's criticism of why a relative treatment of poverty is pretty stupid and unhelpful.

Picking brand fetishism as a way of illustrating being "unable to participate" is pretty startling, so much so that I wonder if she is having us on. But I don't think she is.

Dogs fight Black Dog

SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Health | What's up, dog?

I'm a dog person. Not fanatical, but a dog person nonetheless. (Cat people have a good chance of having brains affected by mind altering parasites, remember.)

The link above is to a nice Guardian story on dogs fighting depression. My favourite bit is this:

"Maureen Hennis is chief executive of Pets As Therapy, a charity which has been making the most of the therapeutic benefits of animals for over 20 years. The not-for-profit organisation currently visits more than 4,750 different medical establishments throughout the UK, and Hennis is convinced of the programme's efficacy.

"I'm very lucky because I've visited patients with depression with my own dogs, so I've actually seen the benefits in action. I remember at one of the places we visited there was one woman who would wait for us and when we arrived she would shout, 'There's my ray of sunshine! There's my reason to stay alive!' It was the dog she was talking about, not me." "

So, apart from my advocacy of cognitive therapy, send in the dogs too. I wonder if they help schizophrenics too? Yep, probably.

In the news

How much worse can it get for Queensland Health at the moment? The Australian (although, strangely, not the Courier Mail yet) is reporting that the apparently unqualified Russian psychiatrist employed for a time in the Townsville hospital was a convicted pedophile and served time for it in Russia! What next...Hannibal Lector worked as a neurosurgeon in Royal Brisbane? ("I was wondering why he always brought his lunch box into theatre with him" says the nurse.)

I heard recently on the ABC that the lack of doctors is acute all over the Western world, so there is a huge "market" for qualified doctors from just about anywhere to work in the Western country of their choosing. But surely to God Medical Boards in other States or countries have done a better job at ensuring applicants are not forging qualifications.

It is also presumably a good time to study medicine if you are inclined. I know someone whose son is in first year of medicine. The joke going around the students was "what do you call the med student who comes last in exams? Answer: ' Doctor' ".

More on what some doctors will do is here (abort late term pregnancies because the mother doesn't the financial cost of a child.) Good to see a prosecution happening for this.

Meanwhile, I don't really understand this whole oil price thing. Why does just the threat of terrorism against westerners in Saudi Arabia cause the price to go up? If the threat was directly against oil production facilities, maybe I understand. But attacks on housing estates, hotels and embassies, which is the character of many past attacks, doesn't seem to have that much to do with oil production to me.

The Economist reports briefly on what oil rich countries are looking at doing with their new oil wealth. Building super luxury resorts and shopping centres is much of the answer. But how many westerners want to holiday in the Middle East at any point in the near future? These nations ought to remember Nauru , I reckon. It will all end in tears before the century is out.

Getting back to Earth

Watching the space shuttle having its heat shield 'repair' live this week got me thinking. NASA has always spent a certain amount of money on engineers trying to think up innovative ways of doing space things, so how much thought has gone into building a better heat shield?

First some NASA info on the current heat shield is here. It says an average of 50 tiles are replaced between every mission, although there is lots of other work done on it every time it is refurbished for the next flight.

I think I read once (years ago in a science magazine) that they had to check the bonding of almost every tile between flights, but I haven't found a reference to that on the internet (yet).

As for the history of heat shields generally, this article briefly summarises it, and contains this interesting snippet of information:

"China developed recoverable spacecraft that reputedly used wood as an ablative material. While this may seem primitive, wood (in some cases cork) is actually used as an ablative material for some American rocket engine areas and payload shrouds, which heat up as the rocket flies through the atmosphere."

It also mentions an advanced idea:

"One promising idea that has been proposed for the future is the use of a plasma torch to form an artificial shockwave in front of a reentry vehicle. Just as the shockwave generated by a blunt body can protect a spacecraft by keeping hot gasses away from the skin of the vehicle, the plasma shockwave could theoretically protect a vehicle traveling at hypersonic velocity (Mach 6+) for sustained periods of time. But there is as yet no demand for such a thermal protection system and it remains only a laboratory experiment."

Pity if it went out suddenly though.

Inflatable shields also get an article here.

Not so long ago, using water as part of a shield was discussed in New Scientist.

So, seems there are limited options to explore for future heat shielding. Maybe I'll just wait for a space elevator to be built.

Update:

More googling has revealed that in fact the cancelled X 33 project involved a new metal based thermal protection system, that did get some testing before the whole project was cancelled. See links here, and here. In fact, one NASA media release indicates it was fully tested and ready for flight.

A more recent (2002) article about metallic reentry shields generally is here.

And while wandering around the Web, I found the forgotten (by me anyway) story of the Air Force's Lenticular Reentry Vehicle, a proposed nuclear powered, flying saucerish bomber from the dawn of the Cold War. The Popular Mechanics story on the link has a Brisbane connection too.

Gee, those 1950's boffins knew cool looking design, didn't they...

Chase giant tornadoes for fun and profit

How's this for a unique tourist venture (go to America and chase tornadoes with your tour guide.) No thanks. I haven't seen the video on this site yet, as I am on dial up at the moment. Will look next week.

Sentencing news

So the self confessed wife and (20 month old) daughter killing husband (who, as I recall, took his daughter with him while he shopped for the spear gun murder weapon) got 2 life sentences, and a non parole period of 33 years. (If you are unfamiliar with the case, read the links for the whole terrible story.)

The sentence means he is potentially able to get parole at 71. I can't see why he should ever be released. As it is, he has the potential to have a "normal" life for a decade or more after release.

This crime was so appalling that it reminds me of the Port Arthur massacre. As in that case, you can't really fathom the mental state of the killer, but there is no doubt that they were aware of their actions as they were executing their victims. John Sharpe also had weeks of forethought and planning, it would seem. I am generally against the death sentence, but there are some murders so terrible, where the facts are known with absolute certainty, that I feel they deserve an exception. This is one of them.

Shuttle sightings

Human Space Flight (HSF) - Orbital Tracking

I suppose that if you don't already know that this exists, you're not enough of a nerd to care. Anyway, the above link is to the NASA site for sighting times for the shuttle and ISS listed for all major cities. I forgot to check earlier this week, and may have already missed the best chance. But it goes over fairly high over Brisbane this afternoon at 5.42, and as sunset is about 5.20, it should be visible (clouds permitting).

Go impress your kids by taking them outside to see it.

Unleash the Ducks of War

Somehow it had never occurred to me before to look for official new sites from North Korea, but a quick Google and there I was.

It's about what you would expect from the world's craziest socialist dictator stronghold. Some things I like to read about:

Kim Jong inspects the "the command of the large combined unit and Unit 615 honored with the title of Kum Song Lifeguard of the KPA situated in the forefront area in the central sector of the front....

Expressing satisfaction over the fact that the officers and men of the unit have thoroughly implemented the military line of the WPK, thus consolidating the military bulwark of Korean style socialism as firm as a rock, he set forth the highly important tasks which would serve as guidelines in further increasing the militancy of the unit and turning the defence theatre into an invulnerable fortress....

He dropped in at the operation study room to learn in detail with the training of the commanding officers of the unit. There he set forth tasks to be fulfilled to increase the unit's combat capability in every way."

Wait for it:

"Then he moved on to the duck farm built by the unit.
He put forward the tasks to be fulfilled to boost the duck production, saying that the farm should operate at its fullest capacity to pay off profusely. He had a photo session with the servicepersons of the unit."

I hope avian flu has got nothing to do with this.

We also learn that Korea's "liberation" was celebrated recently in the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, and Democratic Congo, where:

"Otete Gaston Mboyo, chairman of the National Committee of the Genuine Lumumbist Patriotic Party of Democratic Congo, in a lecture praised the undying feats President Kim Il Sung performed by defeating Japanese imperialism and bringing about a great event of the liberation of Korea after embarking upon the road of revolution in his teens. He noted that the feats of the President are shining more brilliantly thanks to leader Kim Jong Il."

Forgive my ignorance, but that the first time I have heard of the Lumumbists of Congo, who it would appear have been around for quite a few decades. Must be hard to pronounce after a drink.

Update: Sorry - individual links to articles within the North Korean site don't work.

Geneva Convention and David Hicks

Forget peacetime niceties - this is a war - Opinion - theage.com.au

See the above article in (surprise!) The Age which gives a strong defence to the non application of the Geneva conventions to one D Hicks. An article contradicting this will probably appear soon.

And by the way, this stuff about some US military lawyers criticising the whole commission procedure. I am sure there is a considerable lack of understanding in the general public about the relative seniority of various military ranks that causes confusion. An army captain (but not a navy captain) is a low ranking officer, and major is only one step up from that. The US military has many, many lawyers, and it should be no surprise that some relatively junior ones (most likely very young) will have strong feelings against the military commission set up. Even if they were older and more experienced, everyone has to remember that lawyers are basically designed to disagree. Just because some of them see a great injustice in something doesn't necessarily mean they are right.

Gone squatting

I am going to be a bit busy for a few days, I expect, so blogging rate may slow down.

In the meantime, the SMH today in its article on vegetarianism (which, it claims, no longer has good PR) pointed me towards this article on the Australian Vegetarian Society website as an example of vegetarians not exactly doing their image a favour.

The essay has a great title: "The Sitting Toilet - An Inconspicuous ‘Carcinogen’?" and goes into great detail about the alleged benefits of squatting over sitting.

There may be something to some of the points made the article, as it does actually cite at the end a lot of proper sounding medical journal articles. But a lot of it is pretty silly.

Having to use a squat toilet is, I think, more of an issue for men than women because of the, shall we say, different angles that are involved . When trying to use one while travelling, I have never worked out what to do with my pants, especially long pants. You wouldn't want to take your shoes off in the average squat toilet (to allow for complete pants removal) but crumpling long pants down well out of any danger is a real pain, and makes the balancing act required quite difficult. That is the real reason squat toilets are unpopular with western men, I think.

Any guidelines as to what I should be doing on my next trip would (seriously) be welcome. Yobbo at his blog didn't seem to be able to work it out either.

Arguments a lawyer would prefer not to have to make

London bombs terror attack The Times and Sunday Times Times Online

'Actions were a peaceful protest over the Iraq war' is the headline on the above Times article on the arrested London bombing suspect Osman (caught in Rome). According to his female lawyer:

“He has justified his actions as a form of protest against the fact that civilians are suffering in wars at the present time. He has taken part in many peace marches and has never had any contact whatsoever with any terrorist organisation."

That will go over so well before a judge.

"The lawyer said that her client, who appeared at an initial extradition hearing on Saturday, was “calm” but would “prefer to stay in Italy”."

You bet he would.

And Italy being Italy, the lawyer herself is attracting much of the attention:

"Osman’s arrest has attracted huge publicity in Italy and made Signora Sonnessa, 40, into a minor celebrity. Her bronzed skin, long black hair and plunging neckline grabbed the attention of Italian newspapers, which carried prominent photographs of her in their coverage of the story."

Wait while I google for a picture of her

Here we go...

Lucky Osman!