catallaxy.

As Andrew points out, Gillard has backed plans by the Victorian government to free up the vocational education sector by having the Commonwealth provide income contingent loans as a tradeoff for the Victorian sector being allowed to raise fees and remove caps on current courses so that students can in effect buy whatever courses they want - in other words a voucher system. Where before both fees and courses were previously capped, they will now be able to respond to market forces in return for a relatively less restrictive intervention of an income contingent loan scheme.

She has clearly moved on from her socialist left past. Here is the announcement:

There are a number of different ways that the training sector can be reformed to meet the challenges of the future and the needs of individuals, industry and therefore the modern economy.

To ensure that cost is not a barrier to students accessing training, the Commonwealth will support Victoria in the introduction of an Income Contingent Loan (ICL) scheme for government subsidised diploma and advanced diploma students.

The Commonwealth will also meet the administrative costs of the scheme and not charge a loan fee to students.

This will increase access for those without the financial resources, boost the quality of courses and expand the number of places for students.

Again via Andrew, the Liberals are playing spoilers on a reform with the potential to extend market forces across the educational sector. According to Liberal leader Red Ted:

Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu said more expensive fees would only force up the cost of doing business in Victoria

In other words, Red Ted would prefer a price capped, quantity (of courses) capped vocational system rationed to a lucky few. Why not go the whole hog and bring back Whitlam’s free university education while he’s at it?

Meanwhile, in contrast to Red Ted we have John Brumby extolling the virtues of price signals:

Premier John Brumby said the new system was fairer and would make training more accessible, helping ease skills shortages.

“The beauty of this and the adjustment of the fees is that everybody who is eligible gets a place. There’s none of this where some people pay $877 and other people pay $8000 a year for full private cost recovery,” he said.

“It’s demand driven. More will participate and the level of skills in the community will increase.”

Skills and Workforce Participation Minister Jacinta Allan said it was only fair that Victorians studying courses such as engineering and accounting paid more than those learning to read and write.

“Some (fees) will stay the same and others will rise in line with the expected job opportunities and wage outcomes from engaging in one of those qualifications,” she said.

One of the hottest topics of debate among Batman fans is whether Christian Bale’s Batman voice (which Bruce Wayne has to put on when in costume to disguise his identity) was too over the top.

The spoof below from YouTube of the interrogation scene from The Dark Knight nailed this issue perfectly. I watched this twice in a row and was still splitting my sides with laughter.

Barry O’Farrell has decided to oppose the NSW government’s plan to privatise electricity. Andrew Norton said it in a recent blogpost on recent Victorian Liberals’ attempts to oppose voucherisation of TAFE - what’s the point of a Liberal Party that does not believe in markets?

The American Conservative reviews a new selection of essays by Gore Vidal and in the process discusses his small government beliefs:

“It should be noted that Vidal is conservative in many respects,” writes Parini. “He stands behind individual choice, the limitation of executive power, and preservation of the environment. Like his grandfather, he dislikes the empire. … He would return us, if possible, to the pure republicanism of early America.” …

Vidal regards federal taxes as confiscatory and the fuel by which an anti-American war machine is run. “Why,” he asks in his 1972 essay “Homage to Daniel Shays,” do we allow our governors to take so much of our money and spend it in ways that not only fail to benefit us but do great damage to others as we prosecute undeclared wars … in what is supposed to be peacetime? Whether he knows it or not, the middle-income American is taxed as though he were living in a socialist society.”

Vidal dislikes Wilson’s clinical diaristic record of his sexual irruptions. “In literature, sexual revelation is a matter of tact and occasion,” writes Vidal, who, contrary to the idiotic canard that he is a “gay writer,” has written about his own sex life sparingly. He is impatient with those modern writers who, once they “could put sex into the novel, proceeded to leave out almost everything else.” He is what he calls a same-sexer, though where sex intercrops with politics he is libertarian, demanding only that the state leave adults alone to pursue whatever consensual conjugations they please …

Executive orders, executive agreements, executive privileges: he would scrap them all. He admires the Swiss cantonal system and would borrow from it to revive our torpid federalism. He favors national referenda, a pet cause of his grandfather, one of the first proponents of the war referendum that later took shape as the Ludlow Amendment. He would “stop all military aid to the Middle East,” repeal “every prohibition against the sale and use of drugs,” and “withdraw from NATO.”

… He is a Bill of Rights stalwart, however, who takes the now wildly unfashionable view that kooks and outcasts have liberties, too. These include the Branch Davidians, who “were living peaceably in their own compound at Waco, Texas, until an FBI SWAT team … killed eighty-two of them.” …

For all you pop culture afficionados out there. It looks very well executed, let’s just hope they don’t stuff the story up. And for those who are thinking ‘not another superhero movie’, The Watchmen is actually best described as a deconstruction/satire on the superhero genre. This wiki entry gives good information but I would advise against reading the whole thing if you don’t want to have the very ingenious ending given away:

Watchmen’s deconstruction of the conventional superhero archetype, combined with its innovative adaptation of cinematic techniques and heavy use of symbolism, multi-layered dialogue, and metafiction, has influenced both comics and film …

Alan Moore, who wanted to transcend the perceptions of the comic book medium as something juvenile, created Watchmen as an attempt to make “a superhero Moby Dick; something that had that sort of weight, that sort of density.”[4] Moore also named William S. Burroughs as one of his “main influences” during the conception of Watchmen

High food prices? Get a cow for your backyard:

It’s the little cow with a big future. Rising supermarket prices are persuading hundreds of families to turn their back gardens into mini-ranches stocked with miniature cattle.

Registrations of the most popular breed, the Dexter, have doubled since the millennium and websites are sprouting up offering “the world’s most efficient, cutest and tastiest cows”.

For between £200 and £2,000, people can buy a cow that stands no taller than a large German shepherd dog, gives 16 pints of milk a day that can be drunk unpasteurised, keeps the grass “mown” and will be a family pet for years before ending up in the freezer.

The Dexter, a mountain breed from Ireland, is perfect for cattle-keeping on a small scale, but other breeds are being artificially created to compete with it, including the Mini-Hereford and the Lowline Angus, which has been developed by the Australian government to stand no more than 39in high but produce 70% of the steak of a cow twice its size.

Here is a long overview of recent neurological research into brain size and cognitive ability in Scientific American. Brain size matters - to some extent and in certain parts of the brain. Smarter brains are also more efficient though the relationship here is more complex - they burn less energy doing ‘easy’ tasks and more energy doing difficult tasks:

In 2004 psychologist Richard J. Haier of the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues reported evidence to support the notion that discrete brain regions mediate scholarly aptitude. Studying the brains of 47 adults, Haier’s team found an association between the amount of gray matter (tissue containing the cell bodies of neurons) and higher IQ in 10 discrete regions, including three in the frontal lobe and two in the parietal lobe just behind it. Other scientists have also seen more white matter, which is made up of nerve axons (or fibers), in these same regions among people with higher IQs …

In a 2006 study child psychiatrist Philip Shaw of the National Institute of Mental Health and his colleagues scanned the brains of 307 children of varying intelligence multiple times to determine the thickness of their cerebral cortex, the brain’s exterior part. They discovered that academic prodigies younger than eight had an unusually thin cerebral cortex, which then thickened rapidly so that by late childhood it was chunkier than that of less clever kids. Consistent with other studies, that pattern was particularly pronounced in the frontal brain regions that govern rational thought processes …

Over the years brain scientists have garnered evidence supporting the idea that high intelligence stems from faster information processing in the brain. Underlying such speed, some psychologists argue, is unusually efficient neural circuitry in the brains of gifted individuals …

Starting in the late 1980s, Haier and his colleagues have gathered data that buttress this so-called efficiency hypothesis. The researchers used positron-emission tomography, which measures glucose metabolism of cells, to scan the brains of eight young men while they performed a nonverbal abstract reasoning task for half an hour. They found that the better an individual’s performance on the task, the lower the metabolic rate in widespread areas of the brain, supporting the notion that efficient neural processing may underlie brilliance. And in the 1990s the same group observed the flip side of this phenomenon: higher glucose metabolism in the brains of a small group of subjects who had below-average IQs, suggesting that slower minds operate less economically.

The cerebrums of smart kids may also be more efficient at rest, according to a 2006 study by psychologist Joel Alexander of Western Oregon University and his colleagues. Using EEG, Alexander’s team found that resting eight- to 12-hertz alpha brain waves were significantly more powerful in 30 adolescents of average ability than they were in 30 gifted adolescents, whose alpha-wave signal resembled those of older, college-age students. The results suggest that gifted kids’ brains use

And yet gifted brains are not always in a state of relative calm. In some situations, they appear to be more energetic, not less, than those of people of more ordinary intellect. What is more, the energy-gobbling brain areas roughly correspond to those boasting more gray matter, suggesting that the gifted may simply be endowed with more brainpower in this intelligence network …

In a 2003 trial psychologist Jeremy Gray, then at Washington University in St. Louis, and his colleagues scanned the brains of 48 individuals using functional MRI, which detects neural activity by tracking the flow of oxygenated blood in brain tissue, while the subjects completed hard tasks that taxed working memory. The researchers saw higher levels of activity in prefrontal and parietal brain regions in the participants who had received high scores on an intelligence test, as compared with low scorers.

No one is sure why some experiments indicate that a bright brain is a hardworking one, whereas others suggest it is one that can afford to relax. Some, such as Haier—who has found higher brain metabolic rates in more astute individuals in some of his studies but not in others—speculate one reason could relate to the difficulty of the tasks. When a problem is very complex, even a gifted person’s brain has to work to solve it. The brain’s relatively high metabolic rate in this instance might reflect greater engagement with the task. If that task was out of reach for someone of average intellect, that person’s brain might be relatively inactive because of an inability to tackle the problem. And yet a bright individual’s brain might nonetheless solve a less difficult problem efficiently and with little effort as compared with someone who has a lower IQ.

Yes I am aware that our recent comments thread and blogroll have disappeared but comments are otherwise functional again. We hope to get it sorted out soon.

So Obama has chosen Joe Biden as his running mate, presumably because he has more ‘cred’ on foreign policy (see Wiki entry). Problem is Biden is pretty much a down the line old fashioned economic interventionist:

Biden was given a 32% approval rating from the United States Chamber of Commerce. He favors taking burdens off corporations to prevent outsourcing. He voted yes on repealing tax subsidies for companies that outsource jobs and yes on restrictions on personal bankruptcy …

Biden was given a 100% approval rating from AFL-CIO indicating a heavily pro-union voting record. However, he was one of the Democrats to vote for the North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA in 1993. [19] Biden was given a 42% approval rating from the Cato Institute, revealing a mixed record on free trade …

Biden was given a 100% approval rating from the American Public Health Association (APHA). He supports funding for health care to allow all people access. Biden is opposed to the privatization of Social Security and was given an 89% approval rating from the Alliance for Retired Americans (ARA), reflecting a pro-senior citizen voting record …

An interesting twist in this study which suggests that counting ability precedes language:

A study of 45 indigenous children from two Aboriginal communities lacking in words and gestures for numbers found the youngsters could count just as well as their English-speaking peers.

Academics from the University College London (UCL) and University of Melbourne believe their findings demonstrate that humans have an “innate mechanism” for counting.

Study author Professor Brian Butterworth, of UCL’s Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said the findings contrasted with theories suggesting children needed to know counting words to develop concepts of numbers …

The children, aged four to seven, who took part in the study were from one community on the edge of the Tanami Desert, about 400km north-west of Alice Springs, and another on Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

Their results were compared with a group of English-speaking indigenous children in Melbourne.

While both Aboriginal communities had words for one, two, few and many, the researchers were unable to ask questions asking them to identify how many objects they were presented with.

Instead, the indigenous children were asked to put out counters matching the number of sounds made by banging two sticks together.

Prof Butterworth said the Aboriginal children from the two remote communities performed “as well or better” than the English-speaking children in a range of tasks.