Moby Dump

Whale defecation good fertiliser for fisheries

Yet more on Frances

Frances Abbott Chosen ‘On Merit’ To Help Lobby Fed Govt Regulators | newmatilda.com

OK, so Frances may have given the same gushing review of her institution even if she didn't have a "scholarship" there which appears to have been extended to her by personal invitation that she should ask for it.

But I guess we will never know.

I explained the story to someone today (a strong anti-Labor voter) and he ended up saying - "Well, the Abbott's could end all of this just by saying they will pay the tuition fee."   Well, yes, a principled politician might do so, by way of apology for not disclosing a large and generous (effective) gift to his daughter from someone who clearly thought that Tony should help her business by seeing regulations were eased (and probably also by giving it funding previously unavailable).  But Tony Abbott's complained before about his personal finances being stretched, so I can't see it happening.

Co-payments and their raison d'etre

 If I have understood Henry Ergas in the Australian correctly this morning, the fact that the Abbott government's co-payment does not go into general revenue but rather to a special medical research fund that (according to Hockey) will cut future costs by finding a cure for cancer and dementia (honestly, this is his extremely improbable argument) means that it cannot be justified as a measure directly offsetting the cost of health care.

Instead Ergas is seeking to justify it by praising the "moderating" effect of the number of doctor visits.

But wait a minute:   what evidence is there that Australia suffers from an overuse of doctors because of the lack of such a price signal?

I have heard it said that in fact Australian rates of doctor visits is entirely within the normal range for similar countries.   Unfortunately, I don't have a link for that at the moment.

If there is no convincing evidence that Australia is suffering from a public overuse of GPs, why would you want to save money by trying to persuade them to go to the doctor less?    (The fact that the mere news of a co-payment coming has led to doctor's waiting rooms in some parts of the country being unusually empty is no good evidence of overuse - although I noticed that the likes of Andrew Bolt thought so, taking the line that if a $7 co-payment puts you off a doctors visit, you can't be so sick.  The point is, you would have to work out how many hospital admissions have been caused by delay in seeing a GP to work out whether the costs savings of reducing GP visits had really been worth it.)

As Ergas himself admits, the effect on population health is not clear, with the Rand study being of highly uncertain application to this country.   And as Peter Martin notes:

And general practitioners are cheap compared to other forms of medicine. They account for just 6 per cent of health spending. They act as gatekeepers, directing Australians to hospitals and more expensive specialists only when needed. They are not where the costs are rising. They are among the last places costs should be cut back.

Ergas makes one valid point - that countries with what we consider "socialised" medicine do sometimes impose a co-payment and do not consider it ideologically wrong.

But the rest of his contorted argument - that the Coalition plan for one is worthwhile in Australia because it will reduce the number of GP visits - is not justified at all, and is prepared to take a "lets see what happens to the poor when you impose this in Australia" that is typical of the Right at the moment.

The Coalition case for a co-payment would be at least half way plausible if they were going to use it to fund the hospital services that a visit to the GP may result in.   But to simply take the money and hide it away and hope it works by reducing the number of GP visits - no, this is just an experiment about price signals that is unwarranted.

Fear of Piketty

The fear of many Right wing, libertarian inclined economists and commentators that Piketty is right about how capitalism and the rise of inequality works has been palpable right from the start.  Any and every criticism of his book (and of him personally) has been leapt on with great enthusiasm; so much so  that was clear that they saw his argument as very threatening.   (I'm not sure whether they realised how obvious they were being.)

It's clear why they were scared:  I don't have to do more than spell out t-a-x to explain.

Anyway, this weekend's kerfuffle about Piketty's 'errors' by the Financial Times has been interesting.  In the least surprising admission from an economist this century, Sinclair Davidson today writes " I’m underwhelmed by the argument and not convinced by his thesis."  But what I am most interested in is the short video from FT that he posts that gives some examples of mistakes from graphs from the book.

Watching that, it seems pretty clear that Giles and FT are over-egging their complaints.  In a couple of the graphs, they show Piketty's originals, which pretty clearly show only a very moderate rate of growth in inequality in the recent period, and the FT corrected graph lines look insignificantly different.  If anything, the graphs gave the impression to me that Piketty was being pretty cautious on the matter of how much inequality is recently increasing.

In fact, some of the phrases about Piketty that seem to be originating from FT sound pretty much defamatory to me, and of course they are being lapped up entirely uncritically by those who fear Piketty.

Krugman was pretty restrained in his defence of Piketty over the weekend, but makes the point that is very unlikely he's off the mark on the matter of rising inequality in the US.  The Economist has done the most detailed "defence" against the FT claims so far, again showing some examples where the alleged errors seem far from important.

On the bigger scale, what I think people like me find so surprising about the whole Piketty phenomena is that we really had no idea economists do their work with such poor source material on key matters such as inequality.   It seems remarkable that they haven't put more effort into gathering the sort of information that it now appears clear has only been done in very recent years.  (And of course, even when it is collected, there is so much room for argument over its accuracy or correct way to interpret it.)

No wonder economists are so bad at prediction.  It makes the field look rather like astronomy before the telescope was invented.  (Or perhaps to be more precise, before the data from telescopes was available.  Actually, now that I think of it, the situation is more that it seems economists have been acting like astronomers who have poor quality telescopes available, but have been more interested in theorising about what they are seeing rather than in collecting, comparing and improving the data  from them.)

Seems about right

David Marr on the budget of a hidden man | The Saturday Paper

David Marr can be annoying, but his general take on Tony Abbott as summed up in this short commentary piece seems pretty right to me.  This is the core point:

The great chameleons of politics are populists. But the magical
transformations of Tony Abbott are more driven by tactics than passion:
by the need, at any particular moment, to secure advantage.

And I think this is why he will not be regarded as a good Prime Minister.

Paris envy

Over the past couple of months, there seem to have been a multitude of cooking shows about Paris or France, and I'm getting sick of it because it's such a ridiculously attractive country with food I want to eat.  (My wife feels the same way.)

My France with Manu was enjoyable - Manu from My Kitchen Rules turned out to be a likeable host showing us around the part of France where he grew up.  (I wish they hadn't cut short the scene where he tried to eat a tough old oyster about as big as his fist, though.  One strongly suspects something unpleasant but probably amusing followed.)   SBS has been replaying French Food Safari, which provided a lot of information about French food culture, even if the recipes (usually done in Australia) didn't do that much for me.  Luke Nguyen has also been swanning around Paris and France, and whilw I don't find him a particularly engaging TV chef, as always, the locale and scenery is impressive.

Today in the New York Times, the torment continues, with a lengthy article about five signature dishes from different parts of France.  I didn't know that good cassoulet took quite this long:

That long-simmering is key. “All the components must harmonize,” Mr. Malé said. “Nothing is more catastrophic than a cassoulet made at the last minute.” Indeed, the best versions are cooked and cooled — preferably overnight — at least three times, a slow process that yields beans redolent with the deep flavors of the confit and pork sausage, topped by a thin layer of the dish’s natural juice and starches sealed in the oven. (Though cassoulet recipes often call for a topping of breadcrumbs, they are “never found on the authentic version,” Mr. Malé said.)

 I have only been to France once - about a three or four day side trip to Paris from England in the 1980's.   It remains the most beautiful city I have been to, and while at that age I was not overly concerned about food (and remember no real memorable meals there) I have always wanted to return, and to travel through the countryside. 

Speaking of food, even if not exactly French, we bought a ceramic tagine a year or more ago (one made in France, so there's a connection), but only recently started using it.  I thought it rather unlikely that it would give results significantly different from using normal lidded saucepans, but somehow, it does seem to make a difference, and it is in fact a real pleasure to cook in.   Last night, I basically followed this fish tagine recipe from Jamie Oliver, and it was good.

Northern beauty

I was very taken with this photo of Alesund, Norway, which appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald last week in a travel story about the increasing popularity of the Scandinavian countries for Australian tourists:



Yes, I would like to go.

Parts of Africa still pretty dark

Witch doctors arrested after albino woman murdered 'for potions' in Tanzania - Africa - World - The Independent

Police in the Simiyu region said the 40-year-old victim was murdered
overnight earlier this month and the attackers had hacked off her left
leg, the index and middle fingers of her left hand and part of her left
thumb.

Photographs of the murder scene outside her home were too graphic to publish.

People with albinism are often subjected to violent attacks in the country, where they are known as the “zeru zeru” or ghosts.

The condition is heavily stigmatised and families who see it as a curse have known to kick relatives out of their homes.

But sufferers are also a target for traditional healers, who harvest body parts to make potions for wealth, success and even election victories.

Kind of blackly ironic that they are killed for potions for success, isn't it?

I also note this oddity in the report:

Under the Same Sun is campaigning for better protection for people with
albinism in Africa and wants to see witch doctors banned as they claim
current regulation is not working.

 Current regulation for witchdoctors?  The Witchdoctor Registration Board, or something?

And then this sad note:

The group is concerned that attacks will increase in the run-up to
elections in October, when the demand for potions made from albino body
parts is expected to increase.

New Matilda expands the Frances Abbott story yet again

Some terrific journalism being done by New Matilda that shows exactly why Abbott should have disclosed the "scholarship" that his daughter received from Whitehouse.

Of course, it doesn't take much to convince me that Tony is a fool; but honestly, given that he was being publicly courted to makes changes favourable to the College, there is an overwhelmingly clear case that the onus is on him to plausibly explain why he did not disclose the valuable gift to his daughter.  Trying to brazen it out as an attack on her is not going to work.

At best, he should admit it was a mistake (with appropriate weasel words like "in hindsight", "now that I realise the full extent of generosity in how Frances was approached for this scholarship") but his current tactic earns him no credit at all.

Go Tom

Gee, when I recently complained the lack of promising (US) summer films this years, I had forgotten about the new Tom Cruise science fiction outing Edge of Tomorrow.

An early (sort of) review for it on io9 reckons it's terrific, and it has good reviews on Rottentomatoes too.

Cruise always impresses with how much he throws himself physically into his science fiction/action films.  His Spielberg movies were great, Mission Impossible 1 and 4 were very enjoyable, and I even liked Oblivion quite a bit last year.   So I will be very pleased if this one is also good, if it encourages him to continue to pick intelligent and entertaining science fiction that is not a frickin' superhero/comic book movie.   

No showers - but lots of bacteria

I can't see it ever becoming popular, but it's interesting to read of this woman's account of her month long experiment of just using a spray on skin bacteria in lieu of showering and shampooing.  

She indicates that the worst effect was on her hair, even though I thought it was reliably said that if you stop shampooing and removing oils from your hair, it eventually stops producing much in the way of replacement oil and becomes (more or less) clean looking again.  I didn't think it would take more than a month to achieve that, though.

Some of the men in the company that is investigating this idea have taken things to quite an extreme:

AOBiome does not market its product as an alternative to conventional cleansers, but it notes that some regular users may find themselves less reliant on soaps, moisturizers and deodorants after as little as a month. Jamas, a quiet, serial entrepreneur with a doctorate in biotechnology, incorporated N. eutropha into his hygiene routine years ago; today he uses soap just twice a week. The chairman of the company’s board of directors, Jamie Heywood, lathers up once or twice a month and shampoos just three times a year. The most extreme case is David Whitlock, the M.I.T.-trained chemical engineer who invented AO+. He has not showered for the past 12 years. He occasionally takes a sponge bath to wash away grime but trusts his skin’s bacterial colony to do the rest. I met these men. I got close enough to shake their hands, engage in casual conversation and note that they in no way conveyed a sense of being “unclean” in either the visual or olfactory sense.

Thanks, but no thanks.

At least, I suppose, it indicates that the historical periods where fear of regular bathing was rampant were not as smelly as we might expect.

Aren't there any cranky critics who have just had enough with superhero movies?

Is it just me, or a sign of old age, that I really, really care not a hoot how good an X Men movie is reviewed - I still won't be seeing it.

From what bits of X Men past that I have seen on TV, I have no interest at all its whole, silly scenario.

Superhero/comic book movies have been done to death and the effect on creativity in the industry is much, much more dire than the much maligned "blockbuster" effect of the Spielberg/Lucas era of the late 70's to 1980's.

As spotted on twitter:

Tingle on the Budget

Coalition gets a brutal lesson in policy on the run

Interesting to note a few things from Laura Tingle's article:

Who is responsible for the debacle?

It is interesting that when The Australian Financial Review
was preparing a piece ahead of the budget on how it was put together,
people involved all described it as an Abbott budget, not a Hockey one.
There were lots of impressed references to the PM’s decisiveness in
meetings of the expenditure review committee.

This was despite the fact it was Joe Hockey who did all the footwork on the whole “age of entitlement” argument.

 Good to know that I can blame our not very bright PM, then.

Sympathy misplaced

Graham Richardson  this morning in the Oz:

I should also make it clear that I am appalled that the media in this country should give publicity to stories about a scholarship ­obtained by one of the PM’s daughters. The children of the famous can never win. Their achievements are too often belittled as if they would never get anywhere without the name and the good graces of the powerful mum or dad. I don’t know the young woman in question but I can imagine how she feels at the moment. The PM’s family should be off ­limits. They are not fair game.

A few corrections:

1.  Frances did actually win:  apparently a "scholarship" for which (it would appear - we are all awaiting any statement to the contrary)  she was contacted by the College to come and apply for, and with no other "applicants" competing.

2.  I don't think any of her classmates are actually criticising her achievements.  They're just annoyed that their College didn't give them any opportunity to compete for free money on offer.

3.  The story is about her father - a Prime Minister who has abruptly adopted a policy that will massively increase the cost of University courses, and give government support to the type of college his daughter attended, not declaring that his daughter's college seems to have gone out of its way to save him or her $70,000.   $60,000.

There is even evidence to suggest (see New Matilda - which also challenges in detail Abbott's understanding of the disclosure rules) that the money was thrown at Frances to curry favour with her father.

This is a matter that should be pursued.

PS:  we all know that the children of politicians and the famous will often be offered jobs through their family connections.  Nothing's ever going to stop that.   But there is a difference between being offered a position whereby you earn remuneration, and being actually given a gift, which is what this "scholarship" effectively appears to have been.  Frances was entitled to accept it, although if she is smarter than her father, she should also have realised that if word of this ever got out, it may well annoy the other students.  More importantly, her father should have disclosed it.

PPS:   further to my last point - the New Matilda article up today (saying Frances appears to have "no role" despite being on the Whitehouse payroll) is pretty irrelevant, and kind of petty, and came out after I made my last comment.    As I said, you are always going to have the "well connected" getting cushy jobs; maybe even positions created just for them.   Can't see that anyone can expect that to change...

Bacteria everywhere

Yet another case of bacteria turning up somewhere rather unexpected in the body:

The placenta, long thought to be sterile, is home to a bacterial community similar to the one found in the mouth, researchers report today. The microbes are generally non-pathogenic, but according to the authors of the study, variations in their composition could be at the root of common but poorly understood pregnancy disorders such as preterm birth, which occurs in one out of every ten pregnancies.....

The researchers also compared the placental microbiomes to those found in the vagina, gut, mouth and on the skin of non-pregnant women. They found that the placental microbiome was most similar to that of the mouth. The authors speculate that the microbes travel to the placenta from the mouth via the blood. The results reinforce data suggesting a link between periodontal disease in the mother and the risk of preterm birth, says Aagaard.

The scholarship story in more (anonymous) detail

New Matilda has more detail on the Frances Abbott scholarship story, and (as I expected) it has leaked from a college staff member who wasn't very impressed:

An account of how Frances Abbott came to be a student at Whitehouse, provided to New Matilda by a staff member, casts further doubt on the claims by the Prime Minister that her appointment was based entirely on merit.

The source told New Matilda that Frances Abbott was approached by Whitehouse Chairman of the Board - and friend of the Abbott family - Les Taylor, after Taylor became aware that Frances was looking to complete a degree with a competing design school.

“Les Taylor knew the Abbott family. [Frances] wanted to do something related to creativity and styling. She was going to go to one of our competitors. I think it was Billy Blue [a design school in North Sydney],” the source told NM.

“Leanne got the Chairman of the Board [Taylor] to tell [Frances] she had the offer of a scholarship.”
A few years later, in the run-up to the 2013 federal election, Ms Whitehouse became increasingly excited at the prospect of a Liberal win, the staffer said.

“She said to me something like, ‘Do you know what this could mean to Whitehouse if [Abbott] gets in?’

 The ambiguity in that last sentence could do with some clarifying.   If it means "this College stands to benefit heaps if Tony Abbott wins by virtue of changes to government policy" it is much more important than "this College will have a higher profile if Tony Abbott gets in and her daughter as a graduate."

In any event, if, as looks increasingly likely, this indeed was a special, one off invitation to come to the College for (virtually) free, of course it should have sent off Abbott's political antenna that it would look like a College seeking out political favours.  But it is hard to know how smart Abbott truly is.  Not very, has long been my judgement.

Yoo - hoo, Andrew Bolt, won't you do a post on this?

Update:   the story continues to develop:

Classmates express fury over Tony Abbott’s daughter Frances being awarded $60,000 scholarship to Whitehouse Institute of Design

Interestingly, it now sounds like Leanne Whitehouse personally funds and selects:

“The scholarship that Frances received was a direct scholarship from the founder and owner Leanne Whitehouse. As a private company, Leanne has from time to time awarded it,” Mr Tudor said.

“Originally it was called the MD’s scholarship and subsequently the chairs scholarship. It is a discretionary award made and funded by Leanne Whitehouse.”

The optics of this is so bad.  The "best" that Abbott can hope from this is (assuming that Frances was competing with no one to get her scholarship) is if he can claim that he didn't know she was getting such favoured treatment.   Because if he did - it is obvious that it would look like political favour being sought, and he should have declared it.

And remember - unlike poor old O'Farell - Abbott's government actually did change policy in a way which helped this College (and others.)

UPDATE:  As Junkee says, this shouldn't be about the results Frances got as a student.   (And, I would add, her current employment with Whitehouse.)  It is, however, all about Tony Abbott and the reasons he has not disclosed it (assuming it is the situation that the reporting is indicating - a specific invitation to Frances to apply for a scholarship that she got with no competition from anyone else).   The final paragraphs about his appalling hypocrisy (I hated the way he was always parading with his daughters during election campaign) are spot on:

Tone’s hypocrisy and cynical opportunism does, however, explain the particularly virulent strain of schadenfreude at play. Only this morning, Tone told Karl Stefanovic that “families should be kept out of the front line. That’s the way I’ve always tried to run my political operation – that we play hard but fair. Families should be [left] out of it.”

Given this principled stance, it’s weird how Abbott’s ‘not bad-looking daughters’ keep bobbing at politically expedient moments and for photo-ops. It seems inevitable that this habit would bite him on the arse at some point, and it looks like that point has arrived.

UPDATE 2:  I'm rather intrigued by the media outlets that are (and aren't) running with the story.   It's been the top one on The Guardian's website all day, but Fairfax seemed to quickly let it drop away in prominence.   And then News.com.au, from an article on The Courier Mail website, has been featuring it top of the page since (I think) around lunch time.  The Daily Mail on line is running with it too, but is giving more prominence to the stupid "wink" story.

The ABC is not running it at all, but is still talking about winkgate.

One might wonder whether the ABC is feeling a bit worried about further government attack if it is being seen to "go after" a politicians daughter - but surely this is a very newsworthy story about the PM, and can be run without pillorying the daughter.     

UPDATE 3:  Ha!  Karl Stefanovic smooches up to Tony Abbott when he asks him how Frances Abbott is coping with all the questions being asked about the "scholarship she deserved".  (He repeats that line twice, in fact.)  Abbott confirms she won it on her "academic potential".

Tony, the question is more about whether anyone else got a chance to put their "academic potential"  to the College.  And stop crapping on about how you "leave your family out of it".  Frances couldn't be pried off your side during the last election campaign, you user.

Rupert's excited

I've been curious to see if any words of wisdom would fall out of Rupert Murdoch's twitter account on the budget, or how Tony and Joe were doing.   Yet all I have today is this:  "Excited by X Men!". 

I'd be excited if we had an X Prime Minister.  (Come on, there wasn't much to work with.)

Sounds interesting

The abstract of a paper by Gerard 't Hooft which I haven't read yet, but must come back to:

When investigating theories at the tiniest conceivable scales in nature, "quantum logic" is taking over from "classical logic" in the minds of almost all researchers today. Dissatisfied, the author investigated how one can look at things differently. This report is an overview of older material, but also contains many new observations and calculations. Quantum mechanics is looked upon as a tool, not as a theory. Examples are displayed of models that are classical in essence, but can be analysed by the use of quantum techniques, and we argue that even the Standard Model, together with gravitational interactions, may be viewed as a quantum mechanical approach to analyse a system that could be classical at its core. We then explain how these apparently heretic thoughts can be reconciled with Bell's theorem and the usual objections voiced against the notion of 'super determinism'. Our proposal would eradicate the collapse problem and the measurement problem.

Dispute over scientists creating deadly diseases continues

Scientists Are Creating New, Incurable Diseases in Labs - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic
From the article:

That worries people like Marc Lipsitch and Alison P. Galvani, two epidemiologists who write in a PLoS Medicine editorial today that creating these types of new infectious agents puts human life at risk. They estimate that if 10 American laboratories ran these types of experiments for a decade, there would be a 20 percent chance that a lab worker would become infected with one of these new super-flus and potentially pass it on to others.

“The concern is that you're making something that doesn't exist in nature and combines high virulence for people with the ability to transmit efficiently,” Lipsitch told me.

I can't say that it sounds like a good idea to me.   Scientists don't always show a big enough interest in considering the worst case scenarios of their work, as I used to argue about the safety assessments done for large particle colliders.