Month: March 1995

The strength of multi-media text searching is as much in finding what is not there than what is. CD-ROM encylopedias, with powerful searching, reveal their weaknesses just as quickly as their strengths. Here, Gough Whitlam would agree. He does not rate a full entry in World Book Information Finder on CD. He would be incensed that Malcolm Fraser does and if you search for “”Whitlam” you are directed to that entry. Unlike the book version, a searcher does not look under the volume “”W” to see if Whitlam is mentioned and then thumb through an index lugging out one volume then another. Rather the computer scans the full text of the encylopedia for “”Whitlam” and produces the results: Whitlam does not have the grandeur of his own entry. Rather he is dismissed in the entry under Fraser and Australian politics.

Stephen Hawking gets a brief history. Beethoven gets noted in 11 articles: 56 times under his own name, 11 under symphony, 5 under another article and then once or twice in the rest. The resource-number box notes there are 56 times and lets you click back and forth between them. I have now messed around with three CD-ROM encyclopedias. Microsoft’s Encarta, Encyclopedia Britannica and the latest, World Book. World Book sits between the other two for price and content. Each is on one CD. For text content Britannica leads, World Book is next and Encarta last with very large gaps between them.
Continue reading “1995_03_march_encycl”

The new Minister for Planning, Gary Humphries, served notice on developers yesterday that they could not undermine the low-cost planning appeals system by lodging expensive points-of-law appeals to the Supreme Court. Mr Humphries said his message was that he would defend residents’ expectations that they could take cases to the Land and Planning Appeals Board without fear of being dragged into an expensive lawsuit in the Supreme Court.

He was speaking after instructing the solicitor for the Department of Environment, Land and Planning to take an active role in defending a board decision which upheld a case brought by residents in Yarralumla. Earlier the department’s solicitor was going to say he would “”abide by the court’s decision” and let the developer and residents fight it out.

The residents feared legal costs would prevent them from defending a victory they had in the board last month over the developer who wanted to build three units on a site that previously contained one house.
Continue reading “1995_03_march_devel”

The usual pattern is that religious people, especially Christians, think that humans are very special. Only humans have souls, consciousness and consciences. Atheists and agnostics, on the other hand, argue one of two ways. Either intelligent life is a natural, almost inevitable development of evolution and is likely to appear elsewhere in the universe; or they say the development of intelligent life from evolution was an off-chance and if humans wipe themselves out there is little of no chance it will recur. On the atheist-agnostic side, therefore, one’s view of the human condition would not be profoundly affected by the discovery that we are not alone and that out there intelligent life is working away producing Beethoven’s Ninths; Hamlet and Blue Poles, even if in slightly different forms. From the Christian view, however, intelligent life out there is a bit of a problem.

Fundamental to the Christian view is that God incarnate came down to earth as Jesus; told us what we should do; gave us the free will to do it or not (we’ll leave Calvin out of this for now); sacrificed himself and then ascended into Heaven. Now if SETI (the search for extra terrestrial intelligence) finds next week that half a dozen stars are sending intelligent signals to us, or finds an “”unmanned” or “”manned” spaceship coming our way or whatever, the Christian view of the world has to change a bit. Did Jesus visit all these planets as God incarnate spreading the Word and getting Himself crucified, albeit sometimes with six arms? This problem for religion is being placed before the public by the Australian physicist and professor of natural philosophy Paul Davies. Davies, fresh from winning Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, is touring the country selling his latest two books, About Time and Are We Alone? The former is a desriptive book about relativity.
Continue reading “1995_03_march_davies”

The Greens had insulated ACT decisions from Federal issues and the vote should be seen in local terms. The Greens had not yet decided how to direct preferences for the by-election, he said. There is a debate within the Greens about whether to direct preferences away from Labor for the by-election _ where government is not at stake _ to show that Labor should not take Green preferences for granted and that Labor should change its policies away from logging towards forest protection. Others in the Greens party argue that it would be unfair to have a put-Labor-last campaign when Labor’s candidate, Sue Robinson, has been a strong advocate against logging in native forests.

The Assembly’s standing committee system has been cut by 11 positions and two committees under a structure proposed by Independent MLA Michael Moore and supported by the Liberals and Paul Osborne. The key change is the amalgamation of the former planning and environment committees. Mr Moore is expected to chair that committee which will have three other members a Green and one each from the majors.
Continue reading “1995_03_march_ctees”

The new Canon portable colour Bubble Jet printer which is to come on tot he market in May for $645 after being on display at PC95 in Sydney. It weighs just 1.4 kilograms. The true four-colour printer comes with nickel hydride battery and prints on plain or glossy paper or overhead transparencies. It has a 136 nozzle head fed from a tri-chambered cyan, magenta and yellow cartridge and a black cartridge so it can do full colour or mono. Canon says it is a smallest and lightest full colour printer in the world. A shot from the 1906 Australian film “The Story of Ned Kelly” which is to be restored by the National Film and Sound Archive using a computer technique developed by Seimens Ltd in Australia. The restoration technique is a spin-off from video compression research done by Seimens, Telstra and Monash University. When the film is digitally compressed sound defects caused by scratches and dust will be removed and the picture will be improved.

There has been far too much self-righteous tut-tutting in Australia over the O. J. Simpson case. “”We would never do that here. Our courts wouldn’t allow it. They would bring the media into line with “proceedings’ for contempt so that justice could be dispensed properly. Tut, tut, tut.” The Americans are fortunate to have the Simpson case and a law which permits the media to give the public blow-by-blow descriptions.

As a result the O. J. Simpson case may turn out to be one of the most effective pieces of public education in America’s history. And the publicity may change the way courts work for the better. In Australia, people have little idea about what goes on in court, even though courts are open to the public. Educators and the media may present hypotheticals or in-depth analysis after the event, but there is nothing like live drama to excite public interest. And the television ratings tell us that they are interested. There interest maybe prurient, but if that results in a little education about how the legal system works, all to the good. It will be even better if the case results in some Australians learning about the common law _ its defects and merits _ because they will not get a similar opportunity here. What are we seeing in the Simpson case? For a start, we are not seeing a search for the truth. We are seeing a contest. That contest is being fought on the evidence. But the evidence is not the sort of evidence that you or I might regard as pertinent to drawing conclusions about something. Rather it is only the evidence permitted under common-law rules.
Continue reading “1995_03_march_columnmar14”

The civil libertarians had an awkward time at a conference in Melbourne last week. On one hand, civil libertarians support the public’s right to know _ especially when some sinister bureaucracy is trying to hide something. On the other hand, they support individual privacy against some meddling data-collecting bureaucracy. At the Melbourne conference, however, the civil libertarians were not faced with bureaucrats but epidemiologists.

These scientists gather information about whole populations to see if certain diseases or health defects can be linked with certain risk factors. The conference was held by the Australasian Faculty of Public Health Medicine and the Victorian Department of Health and Community Services. The civil liberties view is very much based on the individual and it has been very successful in the past decade. We have freedom of information laws in all jurisdictions which (at least in theory) uphold the public’s right to know and we have privacy laws in most jurisdictions that protect privacy. To date there has not been a significant conflict. The freedom-of-information law requires information that might identify individuals to be blacked out of documents.
Continue reading “1995_03_march_columnmar06”

The Greens Party of Australia got its best result in a mainland election to date on Saturday with 13 per cent in the Canberra by-election. I use the full term “”Greens Party of Australia”, rather than “”the Greens” or “”the Green movement” for good reason. The Greens candidate, James Warden, very consciously stood on issues going beyond the forests or conservation in general. He stood on a range of policies, including health, education and economic policy. This approach was taken by the Greens in the ACT election and has been hallmark of the successful Green candidates in Tasmania, notably Bob Brown. Essentially, the Greens are presenting a complete, alternative political philosophy. The Greens have moved far beyond being a single-issue party in the way the aircraft-noise party presented themselves in the NSW election (despite their protestations to the contrary). For good of for bad, they are essentially opposed to the wide extent market forces at present have in determining resource allocation of resources.

They propose alternative medicine and education, with heavy emphasis on ecology, are far more collectivist and are what the Greens Party would call more grassroots democratic than present structures. If it sounds a little Marxist and ideologically doctrinaire, it is perhaps because it is so. As a result, the Greens Party’s success has some fall-out for the conservation movement. This movement comprises a vast range of community and pressure groups such as the Wilderness Society, the Australian Conservation Foundation, various conservation councils and many smaller groups interested in things as diverse as reptiles, old buildings, art and culture. The people in the movement might not especially like the discipline of party politics, or some of the policies the party stands for. In a way conservationists might be in a similar position as trade unionists last century _ do they pursue their claims through the existing parties or do they set up their own with a full range of policies? In Britain last century, unionists thought they could not get a good result from either the Whigs (Liberal Party) or the Tories (Conservative Party), so set up the Labour party. By the 1920s Labour had replaced the Liberals as the second first in a two-party system. It is by no means an exact analogy, but it is certainly a long-term hope of the Greens Party to become government. Dr Brown says that in proportional systems they can creep up gradually; in single-member systems they have to get across a threshold first and then get a large number of seats in one go. Either way, though, the aim is government. At first blush, various conservation groups might applaud the Greens Party success.
Continue reading “1995_03_march_column28mar”

A sure way to disgruntle a gruntled employee is to change the computer system. Someone is happily working away on Word for Windows or WordPerfect or some other favourite program and suddenly an order comes from on high that the place is to transfer to Ami-Pro or Excel or something else. There are several possible reasons: an arrogant new boss wants everyone else to change to what he is used to (and it is usually a he); a boss who is good at business but knows nothing about human nature or information-technology buys an upgrade and cross-over to a new program at a very good price; a boss who knows a lot about information technology but nothing about human nature upgrades hopelessly inefficient software. Several people in the public sector have expressed horror to me privately recently about sudden pending changes; and I’m sure the private sector is just as bad. At the moment, though, the public-sector is (to use a rabbit-shooting cliche) in the spotlight. Last week the Department of Finance began its softening up of other departments with the report of the Information Technology Review Group. Its main recommendation was the appointment of a Chief Information Officer within the Department of Finance to clean up the way the Commonwealth uses information.

This chief will not be very popular in the departments which have basically run their own IT fiefdoms since information technology was first introduced into the Federal Public Service (when a phone was put into the Treasury in 1901). His chief is going to be a little like the bosses mentioned about who set about disgruntling gruntled employees _ except he will be doing it to whole departments. Now, departments do not like interference from other departments (least of all finance) at the best of times, but interference in the IT area goes to the heart. This is because it reaches into nearly every aspect of what every department does. At present the Australian Public Service has 100,000 personal computers and dozens of very large mainframes dotted about the country, though mainly in Canberra.
Continue reading “1995_03_march_column21mar”

Canberra should be industrialised and made into a typical Australian city, according to former Liberal Minister Fred Chaney. Mr Chaney said, “”It is a disaster for Australia for Canberra to be a model city because it made its bureaucracy out of touch with Australian reality. He was speaking in Perth at one of a series of seminars held by the National Capital Planning Authority to find out what Australians wanted from their capital. However, the Public Service Commissioner, Denis Ives, responded yesterday by saying that the public sector was less than half the Canberra workforce and when you took away the ACT public-sector _ which was very much a service deliverer _ a quite low percentage were Federal public servants and even lower percentage were involved in policy.

Canberra had developed into a light-industrial and service provider for the region. Mr Chaney rejected the view cited by NCPA chair Evan Walker from NCPA surveys that Australians did not want Canberra to be a microcosm of Australia. “”I think it poses an enormous problem that we have a bureaucracy which is largely living in city which is so atypical of Australia,” he said at the NCPA seminar last week.

“”One of the reasons the bureaucracy is so out of touch with Australian reality is because it does not live in a microcosm of Australia. It lives in a town with higher per capita incomes. I find many of the attitudes totally unrealistic and indeed wrong.” He gave an example. As Minister for Social Security he had said at a Canberra meeting that the primary obligation for care and nurture of children was with parents. He had been booed and hissed. Yet he had been merely quoting from the first page of the United Nations declaration of the rights of child. “”I just found in so many areas total dissociation from Australian reality,” Mr Chaney said.
Continue reading “1995_03_march_cbancpa”