Spielberg time

Return of the storyteller | The Australian

Steven Spielberg is doing publicity for the new Indiana Jones movie, and The Australian has a long interview today.

Nothing too surprising in it for someone (like me) who reads or watches every Spielberg interview he can. But there is this slightly amusing bit:

Spielberg is courteous and generous, without front, yet with that slight distance celebrities adopt to stay sane. He’s just seen Kevin Rudd on television, meeting George Bush: “I was very impressed – is he Labor or Liberal?”

Tracee's excited

From a little sorry, big things may grow - Opinion - theage.com.au

With sentences such as this, Tracee Hutchison will not just be in Tim Blair's sights, she's painting a big red bullseye on her pants and waiting for the kick:

...when I heard those historic words from Rudd's landmark sorry speech again this week — as part of a re-recording of an anthemic song about Aboriginal land rights due for release on Monday — few things could have convinced me more of the magnitude and significance of the metamorphosis this country is experiencing on a daily basis.

And this:

A little thing is growing. We have a chance to sing from the same songbook. And we can dare to be hopeful again.

Calm down, Tracee. Just get back to us in 5 years time, and tell us if your excitement was justified.

That'd be right

Concrete examples don't help students learn math, study finds

For some time I have been meaning to complain about the way maths is taught these days at primary level, and the story above gives me a good excuse to do it now.

While I can't be the only parent to doubt the value of the methods now used in early maths teaching, I have particular reason to be irritated with it.

That's because my son has a clear developmental language delay. His general IQ is fine, but it would seem that the way his brain processes and remember language is just not quite what it should be, so that (for example) at age 7 he still needs a lot of correction with the tense of very common verbs, and must receive directions in short, clear sentences.

The problem is, as his teachers acknowledge, the way maths is taught now is very verbal, and a language development delay can therefore cause a much stronger "knock on" delay with maths than in the past. You didn't need much language to memorise tables, or to learn the one set method of how to do simple maths operations. You do need solid language when the maths questions and exercises are all framed in something akin to "real life" examples, or when they don't show just one way of doing a simple mathematical exercise, but 3 or 4 ways of thinking about it and letting the child work out the way that best suits them.

Parents with kids in primary school will know what I mean.

Michelle Malkin had a post late last year about some particularly silly sounding American maths texts. Maybe ours are not as bad as that, but the video she has in that post does illustrate the "multi-method" approach that is taken here, even from Grade 2. The video link is here.

Anyhow, this is all by way of introduction to the link above, in which some researchers argue that the overuse of "real life examples" for teaching maths may not in fact help kids learn the basic concept behind the example. That sounds counter-intuitive, but they have experiment to back them up.

So, great, here we have a hint of what might be a coming maths education equivalent to the "whole word / phonetics" debate of the last decade or two. Maybe in 10 year's time there will be a lot less "real life" examples or problems for primary school kids, and more straight forward maths as per the 1960's.

In the meantime, my son will have been somewhat disadvantaged by current educational fads.

The irritating thing is that older class room teachers can recognise fads in education, but can nonetheless be pretty helpless in being able to counter them.

On other Anzac Day posts

Anzac Day gets so much written about it now, I find it hard to come up with anything original to contribute. But each year I can always count on some dubious post or comment from Larvatus Prodeo on the topic.

This year, Mark Bahnisch proposes that it was Paul Keating who played an important role in "reviving" Anzac Day to the current high regard that it seems to enjoy in the community today.

I am far from convinced. I don't recall Anzac Day ever being really "on its last legs" in the 1980's, as Mark suggests. (He doesn't sound like the type of teenager/young man to be attending marches at the time to see first hand, but I could be wrong.) However, it does seem clear that in the last decade or so it has become embraced in a way that was not predicted.

I don't really have an alternative explanation to push here, but I suspect that the increasing loss of grandparents who were WWII veterans may have had something to do with it.

For a Keating skeptic like me, his forays into history were a matter of trying too hard to impose his views and his sense of the "right" type of patriotism on the population, and as such came across as posturing and a tad insincere. I feel certain I would not be on my own in that reaction.

At least in Australia, the power of politicians to influence community attitudes on such matters is easily overestimated, I reckon.

The most puzzling thing Mark says is in his comment 9 to his post:

I think his [Keating's] purpose, as I’ve said, was to lay to rest the stoushes over conscription and the massive sectarian divide that Billy Hughes opened up. Implicit in this, and sometimes explicit, was a view that WW1 probably had been futile - an Imperialist adventure. He tried to weave it into a new story, but the hereditary defenders of the British Empire vented their fury accordingly.

In the thread, Geoff Honnor at comment 19 challenges this; it would appear neither he nor I can recall any "venting" against Keating on the issue of the worthiness of WWI. As Honnor says, the disenchantment with that war overall seems to have been pretty much immediate.

Similarly, John Quiggin repeats an older post of his in which he makes the comment that Gallipoli campaign was bloody and pointless, as indeed was the whole of WWI, a war of which "nothing good came ...." The surprising bit is that he then says that the danger now seems that we will forget this.

Really? What is evidence that there is any risk at all that young people will start to think that either Gallipoli or WWI were really worthwhile exercises that had good results? They certainly wouldn't be getting that idea from their school teachers, that's for sure.

If the past is another country, it sometimes seems that the left is too.

Getting ready for May 22

Indiana Jones and the Heap of Old Junk - Features, Film & TV - The Independent

Here's an interesting article on the very murky history of the so-called Aztec crystal skulls, which feature in the next Indiana Jones movie.

The movie starts both here and in the States on 22 May, with its first public outing at Cannes on 18 May.

Attacking the facilitators

Good ideas lost in the translation - Miranda Devine - Opinion - smh.com.au

Miranda Devine's take on the 2020 Kevin Summit sounds pretty accurate. She doesn't trash it entirely (well, OK, she trashes about 95% of it), and she largely blames the outcome on the business management "facilitators."

Worth reading.

So much for those clean, Green, Europeans

Europeans switching back to coal - International Herald Tribune

From the article:

Over the next five years, Italy will increase its reliance on coal to 33 percent from 14 percent. Power generated by Enel from coal will rise to 50 percent. And Italy is not alone in its return to coal.

Driven by rising demand, record high oil and natural gas prices, concerns over energy security and an aversion to nuclear energy, European countries are slated to build about 50 coal-fired plants over the next five years, plants that will be in use for the next five decades.

And why might some countries need to build more coal plants?:

Enel, like many electricity companies, says it has little choice but to build coal plants to replace aging infrastructure, particularly in countries like Italy, which prohibit nuclear power

The story goes on to talk about vague hopes for CO2 capture from European plants. But surely, finding suitable places within densely populated Europe is going to be a much bigger challenge than in the relatively vast open spaces of the USA or Australia.

I think they should give up on that idea, and either make it into powder that you can bury anywhere you have a large hole to fill, or algae.

Deveny right

Lefties miss Howard - Opinion - theage.com.au

It's hard to disagree with Catherine Deveny's general idea here, that Lefties like her are feeling a little deflated over not having John Howard to hate. (Phillip Adams used to say that hatred of Howard kept him alive. I wonder if he goes to the doctor more often lately.)

As Deveny says: "The left loves a whinge, a wine and a rant."
And her line about John Howard being like "an ex-boyfriend we're over" rings true too: "We don't want him back, but we want to know he's suffering."

The funniest thing about her column , though, is inadvertent. She characterises the Howard years as follows:

...people felt disillusioned and powerless with a government that ran on spin, dog whistles, scare campaigns, pork-barrelling and fear-mongering.

Sounds like a description of the 2020 Summit to me. (OK, the summit was not technically the government, but the way it was run, it may as well have been.)

It especially had all the elements of "dog whistling" that the left used to love to attack.

A very funny Colbert

This segment from The Colbert Report, on current international food problems, is really top notch comedy writing:

The coming cat peril

Are cat colonies a legal and ethical part of nature?

(Answer: no, no, no, no, No!)

From the article (about feral cats in California):

While most states are stricter in their regulations regarding feral cats, case law in California legitimizes feral cat colonies. These colonies are established or tended by well meaning "caretakers" who believe that cats have a right to live in nature. They are fed and watered daily by the these caretakers. In some parts of the state -- Sonoma County for example -- colony densities approach three to five colonies per square mile and may have 20 or more feline members.

Realizing that one pair of cats, having two litters of five kittens per year, can exponentially produce over 400,000 cats in a lifetime, can we begin to understand the problem. And it is a worldwide problem. A recent study in Australia found more than 12 million feral cats in the country; feline experts in the U.S. peg the number of feral cats here at 70 million.

At that rate, it is clear we soon will not have enough ground to stand on: (400,000 x 6,000,000).

But then again, maybe there's a reason I am not a demographer.

More on anti-Semitism and its spread

Report: Muslim anti-Semitism 'strategic threat' to Israel | Jerusalem Post

It's an interesting report on the changing nature of anti-Semitism. An extract:

Among the report's most worrying findings is the growth over the past three decades of uniquely Muslim roots to older European versions of anti-Semitism. Without discounting classical Christian Europe's canards regarding secret Jewish conspiracies, the ritual slaughter of non-Jewish children and other allegations of Jewish evil, anti-Semitism in the Muslim world increasingly finds its own, Islamic reasons for anti-Jewish hatred through new interpretations of Islamic history and scripture.

From the Koranic story of a Jewess who poisoned Muhammad, to the troubled relations between Muhammad and the Jewish tribes of Arabia, radical Islamist groups and thinkers have been using extreme anti-Semitic rhetoric that has grown increasingly popular with the Muslim public, particularly in Iran and the Arab states. Using well-known Koranic texts, these groups have been mapping out the Jews' "innate negative attributes" and teaching a paradigm of permanent struggle between Muslims and Jews.

The goal of this "Islamified" anti-Semitism, according to the report, is to transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from a national territorial contest which could be resolved through compromise to a "historic, cultural and existential struggle for the supremacy of Islam."

Sounds about right to me. And the problem is, once you have a significant part of your population brainwashed with such stuff, how does the leadership talk them back down into a compromise with a side that that has been cast as inherently evil?

Just a politician

Kevin Rudd has shown the resolution to that age old riddle "what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object". Clearly, the answer is that there is no such thing as an irresistible force, as demonstrated by the inability of any force to separate our Prime Minister from a television camera. (Or perhaps I got that wrong, and there is an irresistible force: that which draws Kevin into the orbit of the nearest camera. You choose.)

Yesterday, after the 2020 Kevin Summit, I saw him on both Sunrise and The 7.30 Report.

On the latter, he was clearly in disingenuous politician mode:

KEVIN RUDD: .... For the Government, and remember for the 11 years or 12 years that the Howard Government was in office, the opportunity for a top down review of the entire taxation system was there. Instead they want for partial activity on consumption tax, and a partial activity on business tax. And business regulation.

KERRY OBRIEN: I think you'd have to acknowledge, I don't want to get bogged down in this, that embracing the consumption tax is one of the biggest single tax reforms in this country's history?

KEVIN RUDD: I would disagree with that. I think it's a different form of taxation but when you come to the overall impact of income tax, of company tax, personal income tax, company tax, indirect taxes, the transaction taxes of the States, and the overall effect of the combined taxation system, measured against global tax competitiveness, previous Government didn't do anything of the sort.

Of course, Kerry didn't press Kevin on this. (There remain very, very few occasions when Kerry O'Brien has shown him any aggression at all.) But, one would have thought these follow up questions might have been appropriate:

"You do recall, however, that the GST was intended by the Howard government to have a bigger effect than it eventually did, eg by removal of stamp duty, but political compromise prevented that?"

"Do you still stand by your assessment of GST as a "fundamental injustice"?

"Does your pre-election insistence on their being no GST increase under your government make a 'top down' review of taxes something of a pointless exercise, if you are going to cordon off that possibility?"

But instead Kerry went off tangent onto the completely out of the blue matter of whether Rudd liked "Advance Australia Fair". Nothing like pressing the serious issues, hey Kerry?

How very reasonable (sarcasm mode)

We can accept Israel as neighbour, says Hamas | World news | guardian.co.uk

From the report:

Hamas said today it would accept a Palestinian state on land occupied in the 1967 war, but it would not explicitly recognise Israel.

Jimmy Carter sees this as progress, but:

He [Carter] acknowledged that Hamas still refused to recognise explicitly Israel's right to exist, or to renounce violence, or to recognise previous peace agreements. The movement did not agree to speed the release of an Israeli corporal captured two years ago, although it did tell Carter it would let the soldier, Gilad Shalit, write a new letter home to his parents to prove he was still alive.

And how about stop teaching your children that their neighbours literally want their blood for dinner.

More important than the 2020 Summit

BBC NEWS | Muslim call to adopt Mecca time

Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.

Mecca is the direction all Muslims face when they perform their daily prayers.

The call was issued at a conference held in the Gulf state of Qatar under the title: Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice.

Of course, if we are going to fiddle with Mean Time, we should be considering Nambour as the birthplace of the new dawn.

A Quest on a quest of his own

CNN reporter in sex, rope and drug scandal - World - smh.com.au

I don't watch much of CNN, but this guy (whose name I never even went out of my way to check) has long been on my radar as having a particularly irritating style. ("Boisterous and quirky" is how this report describes him.)

He's a lot more quirky than we first thought, it seems.

So that's what I forgot over the weekend..

US neo-Nazis gear up for Hitler's b'day | Jerusalem Post

From the article (which appeared last week):

America's neo-Nazis will be staging a series of events and rallies across the US next week to mark the 119th anniversary of the birth of Adolf Hitler on April 20, 1889....

The events include on April 19 an anti-immigration march in Washington DC, a "family friendly" cookout in memory of Hitler in Morganton, North Carolina, for members of the white supremacist website Stormfront...

Still, it's not too late to join in the fun:

On April 26, Crew 38, a group close to the violent neo-Nazi group Hammerskin Nation, will hold an "Adolf Hitler Memorial and BBQ" in Houston with a swastika lighting.

Seriously, is it at all conceivable for there to be any better definition of "loser" than being a neo-Nazi in the 21st Century?

Unbelievable

Police charged Down's syndrome boy with mental age of five - Times Online:

When two police officers came to interview Jamie Bauld, a polite, friendly Down’s syndrome boy with a mental age of about 5, he welcomed them with a big smile and a handshake. As the officers read him his rights and charged him with assault and racial abuse, he agreed with everything they said, then thanked them for coming to see him.

Yesterday Jamie’s parents told The Times that they had been through a seven-month ordeal with the Scottish legal system over what they described as a minor fracas between two youngsters with learning difficulties.

Jamie, 18, cannot tie his shoelaces or leave home on his own, nor can he understand simple verbal concepts such as whether a door is open or shut. But his parents said that he was charged with attacking a fellow student, an Asian girl who also had special needs....

They believe that he was a victim of the zero-tolerance policy on racism under which police have to respond to any complaint, however minor.

Summit reaction

The most disturbing and dis-spiriting things about the 2020 Summit do not include the entirely predictable fact that it ended up with barely a single entirely novel idea. Rather, they were:

1. the sight of the assembled "best and brightest" during the final summing up session appearing to think that it was all an outstandingly worthwhile exercise;

2. Kevin Rudd being so very obviously buoyed by all the love in the room.

I didn't fully appreciate before that the Australian "intelligentsia" (and a considerable number of business leaders as well) were such a needy bunch that this faux act of being "listened to" would make them all swoon. Who knew that the media would (by and large) also roll over?

Of course, the papers are letting their "usual suspects" be as cynical as they like; but there is no doubt that the editorial stance of the Fairfax press in particular has been entirely gullible on the issue of the value and purpose of the exercise. The ABC TV coverage's "bookend" comments that I saw (although I missed most) were so bad they gave the impression that Rudd's PR team had a direct feed into the teleprompt.

Honestly, it has actually felt like watching a insidious process of corruption of the nation.

Maybe my badly shaken faith in the common sense of the people will be partially restored if we get some cynicism reported via some - any - disillusioned attendees over the next few days.

But you know what this whole exercise has made me secretly yearn for? Some actual, immediate crisis or disaster for this PM to have to make a hard decision about; rather than this nauseous concentration on both building up his own profile and defusing potential enemies.

UPDATE: Annabel Crabb has written up the summit as a religious event all about the PM, and this line struck me as the funniest:

On one visit to the Economy group, he [Rudd] arrived among a standing group of summiteers and promptly seated himself on the floor. He did not wash anyone's feet or anything, but the "Suffer the little economists to come unto me" theme was obvious enough nevertheless.

Don't believe him

The Sakai is the limit - Food & Wine - Activities & Interests - Travel

In this story in the Sydney Morning Herald (mainly about one very expensive restaurant in Tokyo,) the writer claims of he and his wife:

We had thought we could cope on a daily food and transport budget of $100 or just under ¥10,000. But whether we are in the glittering Ginza or the relative grunge of Electric City, our only affordable meal seems to be tiny watery noodle meals with small servings of beer or sake.

These little lunches, whether from semi-automated train station cafeterias or battered old diners, cost an easy $30 combined and still leave us hungry enough to chew our hands.

Now, unless Mr Thompson and his wife have unusually large calorific needs or desires, this is absolute rubbish.

Anyone can find a filling and tasty meal in Tokyo, especially at lunch, for around $8 to $12. Apart from the train stations, the department stores all have good, cheap eating. It's not even hard in upmarket Ginza. And it's not all noodles I am talking about either.

The one thing I routinely tell people about Japan is that, while accommodation is relatively expensive (and hotel rooms are small for the price), the cost of eating is not so expensive, unless your do want to go to higher end restaurants or eat all the time in your hotel.

If the SMH wants to pay me to demonstrate the ease of eating on $45 a day in Tokyo, I would be happy to oblige.

A very American end of the world

Escape, Carolyn Jessop's memoir of life with the FLDS, condensed. - Slate Magazine

Slate gives us a handy summary of some of the beliefs and practices of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (being the Texan group which recently had the kids removed.)

This part is particularly odd:

In a favorite children's game, called Apocalypse, kids act out the FLDS vision of the end of the world. According to FLDS lore, Native Americans who were mistreated and killed in pioneer days will be resurrected in the end times, when God will allow them to wreak vengeance on those who wronged them (the presumably also-resurrected settlers). In return for this indulgence, "resurrected Indians" will also be "required to take on the job of protecting God's chosen people"—FLDS members—by killing FLDS enemies with invisible tomahawks that can sever a person's heart in half. Very cowboys and Indians!