Ross Farrelly

Letter to the editor - published in SMH 09/08/2011 The Strategic Review of Indigenous Expenditure confirms there is very little to show for the $3.5 billion a year spent on indigenous programs (''Billions spent but Aborigines little better off, says report'', August 8). This is a travesty for both the intended recipients of the programs and for the taxpayer. It's time for governments to admit they don't know what will work when it comes to improving the lot of indigenous Australians and start to use randomised trials of selected social policies to test what works and what does not. Until this happens very little will change but much will continue to be wasted.

I recently gave a webinar on how food manufacturers in NZ and Australia can comply with the newly introduce Average Quantity System (AQS) legislation. These (currently optional) guidelines indicate how purveyors of pre-packaged good must verify the amount of product contained in the packages they sell. The big challenge is to minimise waste while still maintaining a high probability of passing an audit (0.99 say). As well as covering standard quality techniques such as Gage R&R and Control Charts, I outlined the use of the binomial distribution and the inverse normal distribution to calculate the mean of a process in order to pass an AQS audit with a given probability. To demonstrate the relationship between reducing variation and minimising waste I produced this animation . The area under the curve between 470g and 485g is keep constant, while the standard deviation is varied from 20 down to 3. At each stage the waste, a new mean is calculated and the area under the curve greate...

Last night I attended a talk by Robert Putnam (of “Bowling Alone” fame). He spoke about his new book, “ American Grace ” and the influence of religion on American politics. His main point is that Americans are highly divided on religious matters but also highly tolerant of each others religious views. In brief, Putnam’s thesis is that during the sixties young Americans became less religious but that older Americans became more religious as a reaction to the changes in social mores which took place at the time. This lead to the religious division we see in American today and the rise of the “young nones” – young people who do not identify with any formal religious group. Putnam measures religiosity using survey questions such as “How often do you say grace or give thanks to God before a meal?” However, despite this divide, Americans are very tolerant of people who do hold divergent religious views. Surprisingly, a majority of evangelical Christians in America believe that good peop...

I have been playing around with making the Naplan results more accessible to people who want to examine the data for themselves rather than rely on the summaries published by ACARA. You can find the data accessible via Google maps here: http://www.datamilk.com/schools / where you can create maps such as the one above. Data tables can be found here: http://www.datamilk.com/schools/tables.php and a bit of background info here: http://www.datamilk.com/schools/about.php All comments are welcome.

I've just finished reading a very good book which I am moved to share with you. It's The Uses of Pessimism by my favourite conservative modern day philosopher, Roger Scruton. Scruton argues that a number of fallacies lie at the heart of much of the misguided thinking we see in politics, art and the humanities today. He argues that, when presented with the grand plans of the theorists and the unbridled enthusiasm of the believers in human progress, a small dose of pessimism and a sprinkling of irony would go a long way towards bringing some reason into the picture. He lists fallacies such as: The born free fallacy: the false belief that people are born free and that by removing all societal constraints such as law, custom and traditions, people will be able to live happily, freely and peacefully – free from oppression. He points out that people are not born free – societies have earned (relative) freedom by building institutions, morals, customs and traditions which restrain ...

Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2008 US $27.99, 320 pp ISBN 978 0 31601 792 3 First published in Policy Magazine , June 2009. High intelligence and extraordinary achievement are endlessly fascinating subjects. We’d all like to know the secret behind stratospherically successful individuals so we can emulate their accomplishments. Outliers sets out to explain the secret of success—but it is far from successful in doing so. To solve the puzzle of high achievement, Gladwell takes a number of examples of exceptional people and seeks to explain why these people reached great heights in their chosen professions. But rather than examining the personality types of these exceptional individuals, he looks at the environment in which they grew up. Gladwell’s thesis is that demographic, social, and even ancestral factors have greater explaining power than individual personality traits when trying to account for success. Gladwell’s book is wri...

First published in The Canberra Times , 22nd September 2008 One of Kevin Rudd’s favourite mantras is that he wishes to develop “evidence based” policy. That is, he backs policies which have enough supporting evidence to suggest that they will produce their desired effect. However, it is well known in scientific circles that there is one gold standard technique for discovering such a causal relationship between cause and effect– the randomised trial. A randomised trial starts with a hypothesis – a statement of fact which is to be tested in the trial. Stating a hypothesis forces policy makers to move from a vague statements of intent to a specific measurable outcome they wish to achieve. The hypothesis is then tested by randomly selecting two groups of people. One group receives the treatment and one group does not. The power of the randomised trial lies in the fact that the two groups are as alike as possible in every respect except for whether or not they receive the treatment. If afte...