Journal de Jacques

I’m going to make a second attempt to migrate Troppo to the new server this weekend.

I have two alternative strategies to look at. One involves chopping bits out of Wordpress that prevent the export/import system from working in the way I want them to.

The other involves a few hours of tedious SQL munging.

You may see Troppo go offline on Saturday or Sunday.

There will be transient locking of comments, so please hold off on the conspiracy theories about moderation policies for the duration.

Today (Saturday) I will be moving Troppo to a new server. During the day you will see intermittent connectivity. Once we’ve moved across I’ll update this announcement.

Update: Ahem. The move will take longer than anticipated — it will probably happen Sunday instead.

Update 2: To prevent people being from being upset by their bon mots going missing, I’ve temporarily suspended commenting while the posts and comments are moved to the new server.

Update 3: Failure. Attempt 1 used the native Wordpress WXR export/import toolset, which didn’t work. Attempt 2 (today) broke the export/import down per author, which didn’t work. Most annoyingly it strips out <embed> tags of the sort used for YouTube videos.

It looks like I will need to do it “the hard way”, which involves dumping and loading databases after passing them through some data-munging gymnastics. So it looks like troppo will be staying where it is for another week.

I’ve re-enabled comments.

Given that Troppo has relaxed its comments policy, some of you may be puzzled as to why your comments weren’t being posted.

Well there’s two things. First, the Akismet anti-spam service still sometimes comes up with false positives which need to be fetched from the spam bin.

The second thing is that the Wordpress default is to require at least one comment from a ‘new’ commenter to be approved before they go through “on the nod” in future.

I’ve just cleared out about 14 comments from the moderation queue and will keep an eye on it over the next few days.

A lot of folks on Facebook have been sending me links for a new website called “Menzies House”. According to the blurb, it’s the “leading Australian blog for conservative, centre-right and libertarian thinkers and activists”, which must come as news to the mob at Catallaxy (which is still in technical exile).

A perfunctory investigation reveals that the domain name is registered to one Henry Marsh on behalf of the Dallan Investment Trust. Who they are, Google doesn’t know. The Australian Business Register says they’re in SA.

I don’t want to sound like I’m putting down a good initiative, but nevertheless I will wait to see how it pans out. I dislike inorganic ventures, website-wise, and pre-emptively declaring yourself “the leading” anything before you even launch is suspiciously marketer-esque. Not my favourite profession.

Update: Tim Andrew spills the beans.

Google’s announced that they were the subject of a precise and sophisticated attack, apparently aimed at getting access to the GMail accounts of pro-democracy critics of the Chinese Communist regime, both living in China and abroad.

Google don’t think that the accounts were compromised but can’t be sure.

In response Google have said that they are considering pulling out of China entirely — shutting down the self-censored Google.cn website and closing their China office.

It’s about bloody time they realised they’re dealing with gangsters and thugs.

Update: Google arch-rival Microsoft have said that the attack may have exploited a hitherto unknown flaw in Internet Explorer. They’ve been working with Google on the whole situation. It’s heartening.

Aboriginal affairs in the NT has always been a mess. It certainly became worse after the 1976 introduction of the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (Northern Territory) and the replacement of jobs with “sit down money”.

Then came a quarter-decade rule by the CLP, who were hamstrung both by the Act (supported largely by insipid latte-sippers) and their own happiness with allowing the whiff of racism to float about their policies in order to secure the skeptical, largely non-aboriginal urban seats. But calling CLP policies racist is actually a lazy copout, because the NT Government was powerless to change the policies — the Act and welfare — that made the difference.

There’s slow, very slow, change going on. Say what you like about the Intervention, it acted as a political circuit-breaker. What was previously unspeakable became discussable. Essentially, NT politics was a meeting point of political continents: the NT’s Legislative Assembly, the Land Councils and the Senate in Canberra. The Intervention was the earthquake that came after years of building pressure.

While the policies of the 70s were well-intentioned, they failed. It’s as simple as that. The prior policies of assimilation gave us the Stolen Generations, but the policies of the 70s-2000s gave us the Wasted Generations.

About six months ago the NT Government hired a “Remote Services Coordinator” in Bob Beadman, a long-time observer and participant in aboriginal affairs in the NT. His first report has been published, and it makes for refreshingly blunt reading. Usually these sorts of public reports are written by invisible shinybums, couched in the most obtuse and polished bureaucratese possible. But that’s not for Bob: he lays out his own opinions without the usual “it could be argueds”, “some have observeds” and “in some quarters”:

I want to hammer one final point, before turning to what I am supposed to be doing.
The building of houses and roads and sewerage systems is the easy part of this development effort; the social reconstruction, the rebuilding of people, the restoration of their pride and self-worth is the far more difficult, and more important.

And bearing in mind the old adage that the single most important social welfare measure we can take is to provide a person with a job, Governments must be even more proactive on the social side of the infrastructure/social scales, else all of this will be for nothing.
…
If, again, Indigenous people sit under a tree and watch this frenetic effort by government agencies of every kind with increasing astonishment, we will have squandered another opportunity for social reconstruction. We are unlikely to get another one with all of the features available to us right now. … As noted anthropologist Peter Sutton recently said ‘the incentives for remaining outside modernity must be withdrawn’.

Up until about 3 years ago, this sort of remark got you blackballed in Canberra, Sydney and Melbourne as a flat-out racist. It probably still does, actually. It’s the Tyrany of the Far-Aways, which I have complained about before. But now, for once, it’s coming from an insider.

The report talks about concrete policy in a fair amount of detail, and continues to be free-wheeling and anti-bureaucratic in tone. I found it to be very positive reading. Whether Beadman will actually achieve anything will depend on why he was hired. High-profile appointments are frequently bought either to shut up the press, or to provide political insulation for the Minister. It’s horrible, but true. Policy depends on the wishes of an influential Minister to make it actually occur and stick. Not being conversant with the internal workings of the NT ALP, I can’t say whether Malarndirri McCarthy has the clout to get anything over the several lines (NT Government, the Land Councils and Canberra) that aboriginal policy needs to cross in the NT.

An irrelevant whinge

Before I finish up, how about a quick whinge about the NT News? In particular, their sometime reporter, sometime editor Nigel Adlam. I don’t know if Nigel actually read the report past the introduction, in which was found this paragraph:

Already there are worrying signs that people are not taking up the available work. Shires, and Stores, for example, are unable to fill vacancies. Job Centres report that many job offers to unemployed are declined. We must start to see some ‘breaching’ of welfare recipients who decline work.

This tied into Beadman’s point that cultural change is as important as houses and roads if lasting improvements are to be achieved. But here’s how Nige wrote it up in the NT News:

Some Aboriginal people are refusing to take jobs offered to them, the public servant heading one of the Northern Territory’s main indigenous policies said.

Sure it’s a single anecdotal reference out of the entire 118-page report, but don’t let that distract you from only reading the introduction, Nigel. Good journalists don’t have the time for detail. Or the interest. Or the training.

OK, that’s unfair. Nigel read at least one page past the introduction to find this para:

For it is the natural tendency of Ministers and Departments to portray themselves in the best possible light, to promote the positives, rarely the negatives, so consequently Parliaments and the public alike develop a skewed picture because the broader truth has been suppressed.

He rephrases this slightly with a total lack of irony, given that his wife is the chief media advisor to the Chief Minister, Paul Henderson. I’ve known that Nige is an unreconstructed old ALP-left-style warhorse for ages now — for instance, during his tenure as editor every story about Terry Mills always had a negative headline and an unflattering photo — but that’s apparently forgivable in modern newsrooms.

But frankly I can’t trust him because he cannot be objective. If I was a journalist peddling shares in a company employing my wife I’d be rightly excoriated. Basically I don’t think he can be relied on to write objectively about NT politics while his household finances are directly connected to the success or failure of one side of politics. It doesn’t help that he’s happy to resort to lazy “find a controversial sentence” journalism rather than engaging with the meat, the substance of the report. Journalists love to look up to themselves as bold defenders of the public interest, but it’s total self-serving bullshit in most cases. If they’re defending the public interest, then the public interest better have something shallowly controversial to say before 4pm or it can go jump in a lake.

Having just finished the final units I need to qualify for an undergraduate degree, the topic of examinations is still fresh in my mind. Generally these fall into two categories: open-book and closed-book; with two major categories of question: multiple-choice and short-answer.

The exact mix of open/closed and MC/SA will vary from professor to professor and course to course. It can also vary based on the nature of the field and the ratio of teaching staff to students. As a law student I faced a common theme of open-book short-answer exams. During an “intro to psych” unit, all exams were multiple choice — there were 600 students in the course and two lecturers.

But all of these formats have one thing in common: the exam questions are secrets.

Much of the efficacy of the exam is tied up with protecting the questions from disclosure. In a sense this is a bit like relying on a secret key for the efficiency of a cipher: as soon as the key is revealed, the cipher is no longer effective.

Why have a secrecy requirement? Consider the opposite case where the questions are simply reused every year. The problem is that the student can simply memorise “the” answers. This is generally considered unacceptable because the potential set of questions is always going to be too small to properly determine the student’s mastery of the subject.

What this reveals is that exams are basically an attempt at statistical sampling: some quasi-random subset of all possible questions is selected. The student’s performance on that subset is taken as a meaningful proxy of their overall mastery of the subject.

So far so good. But note that I said it’s a quasi-random subset. Why does that subset have to be created from scratch each year? Because of the secrecy-of-questions requirement.

But what if, instead of creating new questions each year, there was instead some portfolio of (say) 1,000 questions that is reused each year? The student is then examined on (say) 10 of these in the final exam.

At no point are the questions secret. Students may study and review them whenever and however they please. They simply will not know in advance which of the questions will be asked of them. Some set of questions will be randomly selected immediately before the exam papers are printed. It could even be made double-blind, with lecturers not knowing which questions will be asked.

I imagine that one of three things could happen:

1. Students could devise and memorise answers to all, or a large subset of, the questions. In which case, won’t they have had to learn the subject matter? Even the act of rote memorisation can lead to pre-conscious synthesis of key principles as a basis for future reasoning.
2. Students with prodigious memory or trained in mnemonic techniques will do better; but they do so already.
3. Some students will not be motivated and will simply fail under the new scheme. Again, no change.

Therefore I hypothesise that this approach – the “question portfolio” – would provide a better method of examination than the current approach.

Additional benefits:

• Questions are already linked with learning outcomes — students could be told what the link is.
• Students can precisely calibrate their current understanding by taking randomised tests when it suits them.
• Questions can receive much higher investment, as they will not be discarded each year.

Drawbacks:

• High initial cost of developing a large corpus of questions.
• Ongoing costs of “managing the portfolio” to reflect improvements, changes in subject etc.
• It’s unusual and may face resistance or bureaucratic inertia. For instance, it may not be compatible with university rules.

Of course this is all mere speculation on my part. I am not an expert in education; but with the greatest possible respect, neither are my professors.

At the very least, we could put this to the test. Develop a corpus of questions for (say) 20 subjects. Then, at the beginning of the semester, randomly select 10 of them to be taught with open questions, 10 of them to be taught to secret questions. Compare the average performance of those two sets with historical performances. That should give a fuzzy feel for whether it works better or not. I’m sure Andrew Leigh would know a better way to do it, but that’s my gut sense of how it might work.

Thoughts?

Stop trying to make me use your crappy “self serve” checkouts.

I noticed you installed them a few months back. A few weeks ago, out of curiousity, I tried it.

It was just that: a curiousity. My experience went as follows:

1. I was reminded of my first job as a checkout operator, which I utterly detested. It was with your company, actually, at the Big W in Darwin. Your managers there were incompetent and mean-spirited. I guess they got promoted to head office. I do not see doing a job I hate for free as progress.
2. I am out of practice. A normal checkout operator is much faster and has a good idea of efficiently packing the bags.
3. You still needed someone to verify my credit card signature. This took longer than it would at a normal checkout. No, I will not use a credit card PIN. I happen to like the additional legal protection the signature gives me.

So basically you want me to provide free labour, waste more of my own time and get crappy service from a grumpy curmudgeon (me). No bloody thanks.

It’s obvious you’re really keen on these machines. Today you closed the express checkouts so that I would either have to queue up with the trolleys or go through your stupid, rubbish, useless, dodgy, crappy, dumb, time-wasting, moronic, transparently grasping self-serve aisles. I chose to queue with the trolleys.

I noticed today that your competitors at Coles haven’t installed these machines. Indeed their express checkouts were fully staffed. And so, from now on, I will refuse to purchase my groceries at Woolies. I will be buying my petrol at Shell. I will be avoiding Dan Murphy’s and Dick Smith.

You, the Board and Executives of Woolworths, are a pack of wankers. I hope to see you resigning or being sacked with no bonuses. Thereafter I will look forward to the news that you are all rotting in a special hell where you are required to torture yourselves.

Yours Sincerely,

An ex-customer.

Thanks to this furious sturm und drang going on in Canberra, Stateline has been pushed off the air for the week. I find this rather annoying. We have a satellite received here which lets me tune into the NT’s Stateline to get some flavour of home. I’d rather have that than another half hour of theatre.

Machiavelli says that fortune is like a woman (“she favours the bold”). Well it seems that fortune is a bit of a backstabbing so-and-so if your name is Malcolm Turnbull. After smiling on him throughout his entire professional career, she has utterly abandoned him this week.

I mean she’s had it in for Malcolm for months. Supposing there was such a thing as a “Premature Eulogy Index”, measuring blogs and columns like this one, declaring that a political figure was “dead” and dissecting their history. Malcolm’s PEI has been steadily rising and has spiked exponentially this week.

I’m not really sure what to make of it. In the past I’ve basically said he needed a wise old head to temper his boldness. Now I’d add that he needed to adopt a useful differentiating point to distinguish him from Kevin Rudd in the public’s eye. For instance, he might have adopted a carbon tax approach instead of cap & trade. He’d have been clearly different without ceding ground on the overall narrative of taking action.

Or maybe it never mattered. About a year ago Possum of Pollytics fame trotted out a series of graphs to demonstrate that primary votes follow the approval rating of the Prime Minister. No matter how popular or unpopular the Opposition Leader is, he or she lives and dies on the primary vote, and the primary vote follows the PM. Kevin Rudd is just too popular. Case closed.

And speaking of our Dear Leader, he’s spoiled for choice. Does he call a snap election to capitalise on the turmoil¹1. Just in Case: Pity the poor camera crew who will be standing guard outside the gates of Government House for the rest of the week. [↩]? Or does he wait until his CPRS legislation founders in the Senate and then go for the double dissolution brass ring? I imagine that even now the old warhorses and the young turks are busily thrashing it out.

In any case, Malcolm has done the political class a great service by giving them something novel to talk about.