Dark Brightness

This is simply a cool idea: the weather was fairly fine but coolish — at 5 PM it was down to one degree in ceontral yesterday. They made $2000 for World Vision

Good on them.

“Colour and attitude are going to get us there,” Waitaki Girls High School pupil Rose Elphinstone-Hayes declared as she and her friends strode along State Highway 83 on Saturday pulling a bath.

via Girls’ novel plug for charity | Otago Daily Times Online.

Barenard wrote in yesterday’s Herald. Read the full article, but his 10 suggestions are:

1. Flatten and simplify the income tax rates to a single rate of.

2. Remove the various middle-class welfare entitlements.

3. Reduce the corporate and family trust tax rates to the same rate as the single income tax rate

4. Set a limit on core government spending as a percentage of GDP in some sort of “Fiscal Responsibility Act”. .

5. Impose a flat tax on land, as is the case in Hong Kong.

6. Keep the promise to pay all retired people that is, not means-tested New Zealand Superannuation at 66 per cent of the average wage, but lift the retirement age to 70.

7. Increase GST to 15 per cent to encourage investment rather than consumption.

8. Impose flat and low tuition fees for university and polytechnic courses.

9. Tax earnings from investments in managed funds, stocks and other assets at the same 25 per cent rate as for income, profit and corporate taxes.

10. Remove tax exemptions and move most tax returns online. Aim to cut the size of IRD and the private tax advice industry in half.

via Ten tips to tax NZ out of dire straits – 07 Jun 2009 – Show Me the Money – NZ Herald Blog.

There were scary rumours around this morning that Caroline Flint was going to get health. Instead, it’s to be Andy Burnham, a man who cut his healthcare teeth with Particia Hewitt.

Andrew Neil is an excellent interviewer. He cuts to the quick far more quickly than Paxman and Humphreys and does so without causing offence. And why were doctors so dissatisfied with the NHS changes despite the large sums of money thrown at them? Because top-down micro-management, protocols and target culture sapped morale, stifled professional autonomy and failed to deliver better care for the patients.

Burnham may be the short serving Health minister of modern times.

via NHS Blog Doctor.

Because ruling from some form of emotional gestalt is stupid… Hickey gets this right…

It didn’t have to be this way. But Obama made a crucial appointment early in his presidency that showed he was a fool. He appointed Tim Geithner as his Treasury Secretary. Geithner had been the Governor of the New York Federal Reserve. It was his job over the last couple of years to regulate and understand the big New York banks. He failed dismally. He is clearly too close to Wall St and his reflexive actions have been to bail out the big banks he become close to over the years. He has left the managers in charge of the banks and insurers that lost hundreds of billions of dollars.

Even Obama allies such as Paul Krugman have pointed out that carrying on with the failed bailout policies of Bush was a mistake. Geithner is also widely loathed in Asia because he stuffed up the IMF’s response to the Asia crisis when he was a senior bureaucrat in the IMF in the late 1990s. Those same Asian bankers now don’t trust America’s spend and borrow policies. This will drive the US dollar down further (and therefore the New Zealand dollar up) and increase interest rates.

Yet Obama has persisted. Bailout after bailout has ensued. Barry Ritholz from The Big Picture tells the story best in his book Bailout Nation. It’s clear Obama has no idea that he has gone down the wrong track or, even worse, he knows it’s wrong and doesn’t have the ability or fortitude to change it.

He is a liar and a fool that New Zealanders should fall out of love with. I have.

via Blogging On Interest Rates, Economics & Business in New Zealand.

SOme cyclists are green zealots. Others are risk takers who prefer to be fit. It seems this chap is one of the latter (you have to have a certain enjoyment of danger to cycle in Auckland). He also has a neat punishment for nongs who don’t see him.

That said, I don’t bike _because_ it’s good for the environment. I’m suspicious that the extra showers and increased carbo-intake has a low carbon footprint.

I bike because, well, I like biking. And in Auckland there’s the added thrill of the danger. You aquire some interesting scar tissue…

Albeit I am of the firm belief that young men driving fast cars playing tag with a cyclist, should be dragged up the length of Queen Street by their goolies.

via Cactus Kate: Cycle Action Auckland – Inside The Lycra.

Real men shoot, run, fish, hunt, drive and cycle because they think it is fun. Not to “save” a planet that is bigger than any of us.

Which means work.

At present I’m trying to work out how to do a meta analysis of the correlations or odds ratios in a nested confirmatory factor analysis. Probably not needed, as there are descriptive differences and I simply cannot compare apples with gorillas. Problem is there are two papers with almost identical results. But not quite.

WIll need to look at more than OVID for this — there were only 17 hits with the first search so I’ll change words and look again (I was hitting multiple databases at the same time though, so only five papers that looked useful). May not be much else

In the meantime, CRAN let me find this:

Authors: Ken Kelley
(2445)Confidence Intervals for Standardized Effect Sizes: Theory, Application, and Implementation
Reference: Vol. 20, Issue 8, Feb 2007
Submitted 2006-10-01, Accepted 2007-07-30
Type: Article
Abstract:

The behavioral, educational, and social sciences are undergoing a paradigmatic shift in methodology, from disciplines that focus on the dichotomous outcome of null hypothesis significance tests to disciplines that report and interpret effect sizes and their corresponding confidence intervals. Due to the arbitrariness of many measurement instruments used in the behavioral, educational, and social sciences, some of the most widely reported effect sizes are standardized. Although forming confidence intervals for standardized effect sizes can be very beneficial, such confidence interval procedures are generally difficult to implement because they depend on noncentral t, F, and x2 distributions. At present, no main-stream statistical package provides exact confidence intervals for standardized effects without the use of specialized programming scripts. Methods for the Behavioral, Educational, and Social Sciences (MBESS) is an R package that has routines for calculating confidence intervals for noncentral t, F, and x2 distributions, which are then used in the calculation of exact confidence intervals for standardized effect sizes by using the confidence interval transformation and inversion principles. The present article discusses the way in which confidence intervals are formed for standardized effect sizes and illustrates how such confidence intervals can be easily formed using MBESS in R.

I am such a stats geek that this is my bedtime reading. Pathetic.

Bulshytt is a term used to describe words, phrases, or even entire paragraphs which are misleading or empty in meaning. These terms are often listed as features of products extramuros. The term is often confused with one of a more vulgar nature

via Bulshytt – Anathem Wiki.

Long a focus of national anti-abortion groups, including a summer-long protest in 1991, Tiller was shot in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church, Stolz said. Tiller’s attorney, Dan Monnat, said Tiller’s wife, Jeanne, was in the choir at the time.

The suspect’s name was not released; police had been looking for a gunman who fled in a car registered in the Kansas City suburb of Merriam.

Operation Rescue have condemned this. NARAL (the abortion rights people) have basically damned the anti abortion groups.

The slaying of the 67-year-old doctor is “an unspeakable tragedy,” his widow, four children and 10 grandchildren said in statement. “This is particularly heart-wrenching because George was shot down in his house of worship, a place of peace.”

Regardless of one’s position on abortion, sympathy has to go to the family.

The family said its loss “is also a loss for the city of Wichita and women across America. George dedicated his life to providing women with high-quality health care despite frequent threats and violence.”

Ah, but when one digs further this guy had been criticised for using an employee for second opinions. This is very similar to NZ… (ASC is the Abortion Supervising Committee, Margaret Sparrow is their chair)

Sparrow says the ASC plans to challenge a decision made last year in the High Court in which Justice Miller questioned the legality of many abortions in New Zealand.

OK, let’s check the law.

The grounds for an abortion are not contained in the CS&A Act but in the Crimes Act 1961 (and two amendments passed in December 1977 and July 1978). These grounds are:

• Serious danger to life
• Serious danger to physical health
• Serious danger to mental health
• Any form of incest or sexual relations with a guardian
• Mental subnormality
• Fetal abnormality (added in the July 1978 amendment)

In addition, other factors which are not grounds in themselves but which may be taken into account are:

• Extremes of age
• Sexual violation (previously rape)

Self-abortion is an offence.

The Crimes Act also defines miscarriage as an event which takes place after implantation. This means that emergency contraception and postcoital insertion of IUDs are legal. Not only do they prevent implantation, but newer studies show that they also prevent fertilisation

Now back to Dr Sparrow…

Dr Sparrow says Right to Life has been able to advance the case, at great cost to the government and even greater risk to women, partly because of New Zealand’s “inadequate abortion laws.”

Almost all abortions are granted under the mental health ground because New Zealand women do not have full reproductive rights, she says.

This is bullshyt (from Anathem, a word that should be in English: “or example, “bullshyt” has become a technical term meaning “speech that employs [...] convenient vagueness, numbing repetition and other such subterfuges to create the impression that something has been said“. Firstly, pregnancy generally makes psychosis and depression better, now worse: post partum the reverse happens. Secondly, in NZ there is fairly free access to contraception, promotion of condoms, and ready access to the morning after pill. There are laws against domestic violence that allow women to get protection virtually ad libitum. What Dr Sparrow is saying is that being pregnant is a mental disorder. This is clearly idiotic.

“It is this kind of legislative hypocrisy that groups like Right to Life continue to exploit through the courts.”

Sparrow says New Zealand should follow the Australian state of Victoria and decriminalise abortion, but until it does, parliament has to defend the status quo.

“If not, there will be a return to the transtasman abortion trade that flourished in the 1970s as well as to unsafe providers, do-it-your-selfers and over-the-internet abortion pills.

via Kan. abortion doc killed in church; suspect held – Yahoo! News.

The last bit is hyperbole. What the ASC has done is ignore the law. One (as a medic) does this at one’s peril: I’d suggest that if the ASC had to put up with the routine challenge of decisions that occur in Mental Health they would be a little more careful.

So… one hopes that the person who Killed Dr Teller is bought to account. One hopes the trial is public and prolonged.

One also hopes that abortion law is taken out of the courts and returned to the legislature, where it belongs.