crytical

Nielsen – Thump – Pollytics
Today brings about a Nielsen that has the tragics spinning with the Coalition hitting the lead on a two party preferred split of 52/48. The poll came from a sample of 1356, giving us an MoE that maxes out around the 2.7% mark. The primary votes broken down into gender and geography as well as the preference flows, including their change from the previous Nielsen poll come in like this:

As we can see, Nielsen – like the previous Newspoll – suggests the gender gap has changed, but unlike Newspoll, it also suggests that substantially more women are now voting for the Coalition than for the ALP – the first poll of the campaign to suggest such a thing. At this stage, it’s worth looking at the results of all the polls we’ve had since the 1st July (click to expand):

Over the last week, there has definitely been a movement back to the Coalition, but Nielsen certainly appears to have overshot relative to other movement we witnessed from other pollsters over the same approximate period. Using our Pollytrend to cut through the uncertainty, it comes in like this:

Our phone pollster trend, which includes today’s Nielsen result, is currently sitting on an ALP two party preferred of 51.3%. Galaxy, Morgan’s phone poll and Nielsen were all in the field last week with overlapping periods. Morgan got a 53% TPP to the ALP over the 27th and 28th, Galaxy got a 50% TPP on the 28th (and maybe on the 27th as well – I can’t find if Galaxy was in the field for one night or two) and Nielsen got a 48% TPP over the 27th, 28th and 29th. So Nielsen is the odd one out here, suggesting a bit of overshoot – and probably combined with the ALP week getting worse as it went on.
However, even if Nielsen went a few points too far, it did bring in results consistent with the events of last week. If we track the Nielsen two party preferred by gender and geography, a few things stand out:

Firstly, non-capital cities dropped 8 points on the TPP for Labor in a week. That doesn’t actually happen in the real world, so it’s a bit full on – but just because the magnitude of the change might be out by a few points doesn’t mean the direction of the change is wrong. Similarly, the female vote collapsed for Labor on the two party preferred, dropping by a massive 9 points in a week. Again, that doesn’t happen in the real world, but it doesn’t mean that females didn’t move back towards the Coalition in solid numbers this week – just probably not this solid.
The mediascape over the last week was filled with generically negative coverage of Labor – most of it self-inflicted –  but of particular focus was the allegations that Gillard questioned the pension rise and paid paternity leave.
The latter would certainly help explain some female movement, while the pension issue would have been expected to play out more in regional Australia than the capital cities since regional Australia is older than its metro counterpart and there’s a higher level of pension reliance among that older cohort in regional Australia.
If we track the Nielsen two party preferred by age cohorts (and I’ve combined the 18-24s and 25-39’s to give us a tracking sample for each cohort with an MoE somewhere around the 5% mark) it adds some more evidence:

Young people came off a bit of a peak and 40-54s didn’t really move, but the over 55’s collapsed for Labor, from 46% last week down to 38% this week. So there would appear that there was movement towards the Coalition, and that the movement occurred in the places that last week’s events would easily explain – but the magnitude of the movement is probably slightly out considering the poll results that came from the field at the same time.
The problem for Labor of course is that the trends might continue – turning this Nielsen from what is more likely a slight outlier on the day, to an early adopter in hindsight – particularly if Labor can’t consolidate its female vote and pull back a few oldies as well.
Later today or tomorrow, we’ll have a look at the rest of the Nielsen poll, the full demographic tables of which can be seen here.
More interesting though is a 3 poll average of that table, which can be seen here – this latter table actually looks pretty spot on in terms of what appears to be the current state of play.

C By Tom Mccarthy
Christopher Tayler
        The Guardian Saturday 31 July 2010

Tom McCarthy . . . ‘A functioning sense of humour’

Photograph: Nick Cunard/Rex Features

This book is something you don’t see every day: a novel steeped in both high modernism and continental philosophy that’s being rolled out as a publishing event in the UK and US. Tom McCarthy, its author, is a 41-year-old Londoner who went to Dulwich College and studied English at Oxford when the literary theory boom was at its height. After spending time in Prague and Amsterdam, he surfaced in 1999 as the general secretary of the International Necronautical Society, a semi-fictitious avant-garde group co-masterminded by the philosopher Simon Critchley, and began to stage events at such venues as the ICA. His first novel, Remainder (2005), later described by Zadie Smith as “one of the great English novels of the past 10 years”, was originally put out by a Paris-based art publisher, and though another novel, Men in Space (2007), and a book on Tintin soon followed, he was more of a figure on the gallery circuit than in the literary world until Remainder‘s reputation began to mushroom.
In articles, lectures and interviews, McCarthy speaks the language of post-humanism. His allegiance is to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, the French nouveau roman and post-structuralist modes of thought; with a few exceptions, such as William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon, most English-language writing since modernism’s heyday can be written off as naive, reactionary stuff. It’s bracing and fun to see these views being aired in a stubbornly non-modernistic literary culture. But McCarthy’s art world affiliations, and the rather arts-institutional intellectual currency he trades in, also raise the suspicion that his end product might turn out to be a bit pretentious, in the style of Deleuze-loving architecture theorists or Lacan-quoting gallery notes. This suspicion isn’t totally off the mark, yet McCarthy is a talented and intelligent novelist; however pretension-prone the scene he’s interested in might be, his writing is tight and lucid, and he has a functioning sense of humour.
C is a 1960s-style anti-novel that’s fundamentally hostile to the notion of character and dramatises, or encodes, a set of ideas concerning subjectivity. On the face of it, though, it’s a historical fantasy, sometimes witty and sometimes eerie, built around the early years of radio transmission. The central figure, Serge Carrefax, is born in 1898 on an estate named Versoie in southern England. His father, an eccentric inventor, oversees a school for deaf children; his mother, who is deaf and was once the father’s pupil, manufactures silk. Serge and his older sister, Sophie, grow up surrounded by transmitters and insects; Serge gets the wireless bug, while Sophie develops an interest in natural history. Time passes, punctuated by their father’s elaborate school plays, pageants based on Elizabethan translations of Ovid. Then, after her initiation into adult sexuality, Sophie starts channelling cryptic messages. With the first world war looming, she drinks a glass of cyanide.
Sophie’s death and interment hang heavily over Serge’s subsequent career in a way that’s far from being conventionally novelistic. Though he’s sent to a spa town in central Europe to be treated for “black bile”, Serge doesn’t do much in the way of emoting, being more interested in precise spatial perceptions and the feelings he gets from dialling through radio frequencies. Under the influence of his godfather, a jovially sinister cryptographer named Widsun, he heads off to the war as a wireless operator in spotter planes over the front – an experience he enjoys in a Futurist kind of way. Having acquired a taste for cocaine and heroin, he turns up next in interwar London, studying architecture and tangling with flappers and fraudulent spiritualists. Finally, in 1922 (a key year in the history of literary modernism), he’s sent to Egypt to help set up a world-spanning imperial communications network, a task that takes him to an archaeological dig where McCarthy dispenses a few of the keys to what is, by this stage, an immense symbolic superstructure.
Needless to say, Serge isn’t a rounded character. He himself has trouble getting to grips with perspective; at one point someone studies his features “as though trying to draw their flat inscrutability out into some kind of relief”. Like the narrator of Remainder, he’s projected as a blank everyman, with a blokey, quizzical attitude to high-flown statements. But while he isn’t an arty or intellectual figure, everything around him bursts with both qualities, from the novel’s multivalently punning nomenclature to the micro-organised threads of imagery and argument involving Greek myth, Renaissance verse, geometry, earth and insects (these last, as in Finnegans Wake, playing on “incest”). Though Serge holds the foreground, it’s plain from early on that the novel is chiefly structured by the idea of transmission and reception, which serves as a metaphor for, among many other things, and very roughly speaking, an implied relationship between language, technology and subjectivity.
The near-Joycean scale and density of all this is truly impressive, as is McCarthy’s ability to fold it into a cleanly constructed narrative, which has its boring stretches but also moments of humour and weird beauty. Yet its mind-blowingness as a reading experience depends on the reader’s appetite for certain types of analysis. Armed with various concepts from Heidegger, Freud or Paul Virilio, say, it would be possible to unpick its implications more or less indefinitely, but there’s a dispiriting feeling that the book has been reverse-engineered with an eye to achieving just that. On the other hand, Sophie’s death, which is partly an allegory for lost philosophical certainties, can also be read as taking on an emotional weight that goes against the grain of the novel’s ostensible scorn for squishy psychologising. “Will he turn out,” McCarthy asked recently of the French writer Jean-Philippe Toussaint, “to have been deconstructing literary sentimentalism or sentimentalising literary deconstruction?” It’s a sign of his writerly horse sense that this skilfully realised, ambitious, over-literary book finds the time to leave a similar question hanging.

Adam Roberts On The Extraordinary Viktor Bout

21/12/2008

Thai police take Viktor Bout for questioning. Photograph: AP
This month a Russian businessman (as the Russian parliament likes to describe him) will sit through his latest extradition hearings in Bangkok, dressed in the prison garb of an orange T-shirt and shorts. One of these will be held on Christmas Eve. In the court American prosecutors will try, as they have for most of the past year, to have him removed to New York. They want to put him on trial for trying to collaborate with terrorists, the Colombian leftwing revolutionary movement Farc, to which the Russian (via an English envoy) reportedly tried to sell a huge arsenal of weapons in the course of assorted meetings in the Caribbean, Copenhagen, Bucharest and Bangkok.
This is the tale of Viktor Bout, a larger than life character whose story tells of a darker side of globalisation. It might have been lifted from the pages of a John Le Carre novel and the tale has, already, provided material for one Hollywood blockbuster, Lord of War, starring Nicolas Cage. Bout labelled the film rubbish and said that he felt sorry for Cage (an actor whom the Russian otherwise likes, apparently). But it is most unlikely to be the last time that Bout sees himself portrayed, in some way or other, on the big screen. Look out for a new film about him starring Angelina Jolie as a determined UN arms trade investigator within the next year or two.
Bout is an arms dealer and provider of large transport aircraft of some renown, who made himself extremely rich in the 1990s by trading all sorts of weapons and goods (including frozen chickens and precious flowers) in Africa, the Middle East and beyond. He is accused of breaking UN arms embargoes and of fuelling nasty civil wars by supplying a bafflingly wide array of combatants with weapons. He denies doing anything illegal and claims that for several years he has been out of the trading business. But Global Witness, a British activist group which has traced Mr Bout’s career over the years, suggests that the Russian has been involved in wars across Africa and beyond. There is nothing that he hasn’t done, sums up one spokesman.
Bout enjoyed two big advantages: his access to a fleet of Soviet-era aircraft (which gave him the means to reach the most remote warlord or rebel army in the African bush) and his access to a huge stockpile of surplus Soviet weaponry (which gave him the goods to sell). One expert on his life describes him as a former member of the GRU, a part of Russia’s secret service network (in British terms, a mix of the Special Air Services and MI6). In the 1990s he went into active reserve, making money by exploiting his close ties to the Russian military and his experience in Africa.
He benefited, too, from a widespread neglect of Africa in the 1990s, when outside governments largely wrote off the continent as too poor and troubled to matter. That left political space open for private actors, mercenaries and arms traders to strike up close relationships with warlords, governments, rebels and more. From Africa he is accused of moving on, establishing a hub for his private airline in the Middle East, from where he became involved in flying goods to Afghanistan and later to America-run Iraq. Ironically, as one part of the American government was attempting to have Bout detained for his alleged nefarious dealings, another part of the American government was using Bout’s services to fly goods to its soldiers in Baghdad.
Bout may eventually be brought to New York, although the Russian government is determined to prevent that happening. If he does go on trial, perhaps next year, watch out for a colourful performance that may shed light on a whole range of dubious activities by African and western governments alike, by shady businessmen who prosper on the margins of wars and by intelligence agencies involved either in trying to pounce on Bout (which the British failed to do in Athens) or to use him as a partner in the fight against terrorists.
Expect, too, the myth of Bout to grow. He is too strong a character to be neglected: he is dumpy, moustachioed, mysterious, intelligent (he speaks several languages fluently), mercurial (he reportedly has passports from five countries), anguished about conservation (he is said to be troubled about the state of the jungle in Congo and the plight of pygmies) and is rather charismatic. As important, as a Russian hunted by American prosecutors, he is caught within a story that has echoes of cold war clashes between the two large powers. No doubt the Americans are keen to see what intelligence value Bout might have, as well as to see justice done. The Russians are probably equally keen to prevent their citizen being taken to America for further investigations. Bout was nabbed by American Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents and Thai policemen after a remarkable sting operation that culminated in a luxury Bangkok hotel this year. That added another chapter to his incredible tale. The finale is yet to come.

Things to Say when Drunk

Things that are difficult to say when you’re drunk…
Innovative
Preliminary
Proliferation
Cinnamon

Things that are VERY difficult to say when you’re drunk…
Specificity
British Constitution
Passive-aggressive disorder
Transubstantiate

Things that are IMPOSSIBLE to say when you’re drunk…
Thanks, but I don’t want to sleep with you.
Nope, no more booze for me.
Sorry, but you’re not really my type.
Good evening officer, isn’t it lovely out tonight?
Oh, I just couldn’t – no one wants to hear me sing.
I must be going home now as I have work in the morning.

Betting Market Friday

23. 07. 2010
The first week of the campaign saw little movement in the markets, with the change in implied probabilities of ALP victory moving between a 1.7% increase to Labor through to a 1.4% reduction. On our 5 agency aggregate probability, these small movements effectively canceled each other out, keeping the aggregate probability steady. With pretty much nothing happening in the headline markets over the last week, the usual charts come in like this.

A prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.

A Eulogy To Stephen Schneider
Ben Santer
We were greatly saddened to learn that our revered colleague Stephen Schneider passed away this morning.
We are posting a personal account by Ben Santer of Steve’s amazing accomplishments and contributions. Ben’s account provides a glimpse into what made Steve so special, and why he will be so deeply missed:
Today the world lost a great man. Professor Stephen Schneider – a climate scientist at Stanford University – passed away while on travel in the United Kingdom.
Stephen Schneider did more than any other individual on the planet to help us realise that human actions have led to global-scale changes in Earth’s climate. Steve was instrumental in focusing scientific, political, and public attention on one of the major challenges facing humanity – the problem of human-caused climate change.
Some climate scientists have exceptional talents in pure research. They love to figure out the inner workings of the climate system. Others have strengths in communicating complex scientific issues to non-specialists. It is rare to find scientists who combine these talents.
Steve Schneider was just such a man.
Steve had the rare gift of being able to explain the complexities of climate science in plain English. He could always find the right story, the right metaphor, the right way of distilling difficult ideas and concepts down to their essence. Through his books, his extensive public speaking, and his many interactions with the media, Steve did for climate science what Carl Sagan did for astronomy.
But Steve was not only the world’s pre-eminent populariser of climate science. He also made remarkable contributions to our scientific understanding of the nature and causes of climate change. He performed pioneering research on the effects of aerosol particles on climate. This work eventually led to investigation of how planetary cooling might be caused by the aerosol particles arising from large-scale fires generated by a nuclear war. This clear scientific warning of the possible climatic consequences of nuclear war may have nudged our species onto a different – and hopefully more sustainable – pathway.
Steve was also a pioneer in the development and application of the numerical models we now use to study climate change. He and his collaborators employed both simple and complex computer models in early studies of the role of clouds in climate change, and in research on the climatic effects of massive volcanic eruptions. He was one of the first scientists to address what we now call the “signal detection problem” – the problem of determining where we might expect to see the first clear evidence of a human effect on global climate.
After spending many years at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Steve moved to Stanford in 1996. At Stanford, Steve and his wife Terry Root led ground-breaking research on the impacts of human-caused climate change on the distribution and abundance of plant and animal species. More recently, Steve kept intellectual company with some of the world’s leading experts on the economics of climate change, and attempted to estimate the cost of stabilising our planet’s climate. Until his untimely death, he continued to produce cutting-edge scientific research on such diverse topics as abrupt climate change, policy options for mitigating and adapting to climate change, and whether we can usefully identify levels of planetary temperature increase beyond which we risk “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate system.
Steve Schneider helped the world understand that the burning of fossil fuels had altered the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere, and that this change in atmospheric composition had led to a discernible human influence on our planet’s climate. He worked tirelessly to bring this message to the attention of fellow scientists, policymakers, and the general public. His voice was clear and consistent, despite serious illness, and despite encountering vocal opposition by powerful forces – individuals who seek to make policy on the basis of wishful thinking and disinformation rather than sound science.
Steve Schneider epitomised scientific courage. He was fearless. The pathway he chose – to be a scientific leader, to be a leader in science communication, and to fully embrace the interdisciplinary nature of the climate change problem – was not an easy pathway. Yet without the courage of leaders like Stephen Schneider, the world would not be on the threshold of agreeing to radically change the way we use energy. We would not be on the verge of a global treaty to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases.
It was a rare privilege to call Steve Schneider my colleague and friend. It was a privilege to listen to Steve jamming on his beloved 12-string guitar; to sing Bob Dylan songs with him. It was a privilege to share laughter, and good food, and a good glass of red wine. It was a privilege to hear his love of science, and his deep passion for it.
We honour the memory of Steve Schneider by continuing to fight for the things he fought for – by continuing to seek clear understanding of the causes and impacts of climate change. We honour Steve by recognising that communication is a vital part of our job. We honour Steve by taking the time to explain our research findings in plain English. By telling others what we do, why we do it, and why they should care about it. We honour Steve by raising our voices, and by speaking out when powerful “forces of unreason” seek to misrepresent our science. We honour Steve Schneider by caring about the strange and beautiful planet on which we live, by protecting its climate, and by ensuring that our policymakers do not fall asleep at the wheel.

Betting Market Friday

This week the betting markets had a bit of a non-consensus moment, with Betfair and Sportingbet moving towards the Coalition, Centrebet moving towards Labor, while Sportsbet and IASbet twiddled their thumbs. As a result, the aggregated implied probability of the five agencies pulled back slightly for a Labor victory from 76.4% to 75.5%. The usual charts come in like this:

If an alien bug invaded the brains of half the population, hijacked their neurochemistry, altered the way they acted and drove some of them crazy, then you might expect a few excitable headlines to appear in the press. Yet something disturbingly like this may actually be happening without the world noticing.
Toxoplasma gondii is not an alien; it is a relative of that down-to-earth pathogen Plasmodium, the beast that causes malaria. It is common: in some parts of the world as much as 60% of the population is infected with it. And it can harm fetuses and people with AIDS, because in each case their immune systems cannot cope with it. For other people, though, the symptoms are usually no worse than a mild dose of flu. Not much for them to worry about, then. Except that there is a growing body of evidence that some of those people have their behaviour permanently changed.
One reason to suspect this is that a country’s level of Toxoplasma infection seems to be related to the level of neuroticism displayed by its population. Another is that those infected seem to have poor reaction times and are more likely to be involved in road accidents. A third is that they have short attention spans and little interest in seeking out novelty. A fourth, possibly the most worrying, is that those who suffer from schizophrenia are more likely than those who do not to have been exposed to Toxoplasma.
Nor is any of this truly surprising. For, besides humans, Toxoplasma has two normal hosts: rodents and cats. And what it does to rodents is very odd indeed.

Fatal feline attraction
Joanne Webster of Imperial College, London, has been studying Toxoplasma for years. Like Plasmodium, which cycles between mosquitoes and man, Toxoplasma cycles between its rodent and feline hosts, living out different phases of its existence in each. In cats, it resides in the wall of the small intestine and passes out of the host in its faeces. These are then picked up by rats and mice (and also by other mammal species, including humans), where they form cysts in brain, liver and muscle tissue. Eventually, if the parasites are lucky, their rodent host is eaten by a cat and the whole cycle starts again.
Unlike Plasmodium, however, which can rely on the natural behaviour of mosquitoes to spread it around, Toxoplasma’s rodent hosts have a strong aversion to helping it into its next home. Which is where, in Dr Webster’s elegant phrase, fatal feline attraction comes in. Rats and mice infected with Toxoplasma start wandering around and drawing attention to themselves—in other words, behaving in ways that will bring them to the attention of cats. They are even, Dr Webster’s work suggests, attracted to the smell of cats.
How these behavioural changes come about was, until recently, obscure. But in 2009 Glenn McConkey of the University of Leeds, in England, analysed Toxoplasma’s DNA. When he compared the results with those of other species, he discovered that two of the bug’s genes encode enzymes involved in the production of a molecule called dopamine. This molecule acts, in animals that have nervous systems, as a chemical messenger between nerve cells. It does not, however, have any known function in single-celled critters. Moreover, dopamine is particularly implicated in schizophrenia. Haloperidol, an antipsychotic drug, works by blocking dopamine receptors.
Intriguingly, Dr Webster has found that haloperidol serves to reverse fatal feline attraction in rats. This suggests the parasite is indeed interfering with the brain’s dopamine system—and thus that it might be doing the same thing in people. Dr McConkey is now making a version of Toxoplasma with the dopamine genes excised, to see if rats infected with this modified bug are protected from the fatal attraction.

Culture club
The evidence that human toxoplasmosis does more than appears at first sight is, it must be said, quite scattered. But it is intriguing and probably worth following up.
The connection with schizophrenia was originally suggested in the 1950s, but only really took off in 2003, when it was revived by Fuller Torrey of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, near Washington, DC. In collaboration with Bob Yolken of Johns Hopkins University, Dr Fuller discovered that people who suffer from schizophrenia are almost three times more likely than the general population to have antibodies to Toxoplasma.
That does not, of course, prove Toxoplasma causes schizophrenia. As every science student is taught from the beginning, correlation is not causation. It could be that schizophrenics are more susceptible to the infection, or some third, as yet unidentified variable may be involved.
Another interesting correlation has, though, been discovered by Jaroslav Flegr of Charles University in Prague. Dr Flegr has studied several aspects of the Toxoplasma question. In one case he looked at the infection rate of people involved in road accidents. Both drivers and pedestrians who had been in accidents were almost three times more likely to be infected than comparable individuals who had not been. Similar results have been found in Turkey, by Kor Yereli of Celal Bayar University, in Manisa. And Dr Flegr has found other abnormalities in infected people. These included reduced reaction times and shorter attention spans—both of which might help to explain the accident statistics—and a reduction in “novelty-seeking”.
This latter is curious. The sort of behaviour shown by rodents is, if anything, an increase in novelty-seeking. But the point is that novelty-seeking is controlled by nerve cells that respond to dopamine. Humans are dead-end hosts as far as Toxoplasma is concerned, so the exact effect will not have been honed by natural selection and may therefore be different from the one in animals that are actually useful to the parasite.
All of these suggested effects are obviously bad for the individuals involved, but some researchers go further and propose that entire societies are being altered by Toxoplasma. In 2006 Kevin Lafferty of the University of California, Santa Barbara, published a paper noting a correlation between levels of neuroticism established by national surveys in various countries and the level of Toxoplasma infection recorded in pregnant women (a group who are tested routinely). The places he looked at ranged from phlegmatic Britain, with a neuroticism score of -0.8 and a Toxoplasma infection rate of 6.6%, to hot-blooded France, which scored 1.8 and had an infection rate of 45%. Cross-Channel prejudices, then, may have an unexpected origin.
To repeat, correlation is not causation, and a lot more work would need to be done to prove the point. But it is just possible that a parasite’s desire to get eaten by a cat is shaping the cultures of the world.
Excerpted from Toxoplasmosis and psychology: A game of cat and mouse | The Economist