About Author: Josh

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Editor, writer and online strategist with expertise in IT, financial services, online tech, social media, telecoms, small business. Very few strange habits. No hideous scars.

Posts by Josh

1

Australian journalists must avoid such amateurish mistakes

By
Josh
– 15 May 2012Posted in: media, politics, techno-wankery

In Delimiter yesterday, Renai LeMay asks with all seriousness if Tony Abbott is consciously lying about the costs (to the government and to customers) of the National Broadband Network. You wouldn’t think it would be a very long article: just “Yes he is” and where do you go from there?

But LeMay lays out in detail some of the statements Abbott has made in the past few months and carefully examines the evidence for (not much) and against (lots) these being based on anything resembling consensus reality. Statement, facts. Statement, facts. Statement, facts.

LeMay then wonders how a journalist is supposed to treat a politician who has clearly moved beyond ‘factually inaccurate’ or ‘mistaken’ and deep into ‘wilfully misleading’ or ‘lying his arse off’ territory.

A fair question, but there is a simple answer, which you can deduce by following the behaviour of almost all journalists in the Australian mainstream media. As I commented on the article:

It’s not a journalist’s job to point out when a public figure is lying. Just report what s/he said and find someone who said a different thing to balance it out.

Don’t give away which one you think is more credible or introduce any facts on your own — it’s well known facts have a left-wing bias. Just make sure you give both sides of the argument equal space for their assertions and let readers make up their own minds.

Didn’t you go to journalism school?

 

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7

Australian journalists can’t count, can’t think

By
Josh
– 8 January 2012Posted in: damned lies and statistics, media

The Sun-Herald today revealed the shocking fact that the number of Australian tourists being arrested for crimes overseas has doubled in the past decade.

Bogans abroad. Photo: nineMSNThis plays into well-worn stereotypes about cashed-up bogans misbehaving drunkenly on football team trips to Bali, and a handful of recent, high-profile cases of Aussies charged with drug dealing, murder and espionage. Clearly we are meant to believe that our fellow countrypersons are going overseas and behaving badly — indeed much worse than ever before — or that foreign police increasingly putting Australians in the slammer at the slightest provocation.

Except. Has the number of Australians travelling overseas remained fairly static over the past 10 years? If so, this is a clear indication of growing boganisation of, or foreign law enforcement hostility to, Aussies. But if, say, the number of Australians going on overseas trips also doubled over the same period, then this statistic would be wholly unremarkable.

Let’s say 10 years ago, 100 Aussies went overseas and one was arrested. Then last year, 200 intrepid travellers boarded a Qantas jet for foreign shores and two were arrested. Whoop-de-fucking-do, you would have to say.

But for an overworked journalist writing a scare piece about how you’re twice as likely to end up being sodomised in Kerobokan Prison the instant you leave our fair shores, that’s all a bit of hard work.

If you Googled, say, ‘number of Australians travelling overseas‘ and clicked on the top link, you’d come to the Australian Bureau of Statistics publication 4102.0 – Australian Social Trends, Sep 2010 : Holidaying Abroad. Scroll down to the last chart on the page, ‘Total short-term arrivals and departures’, which I have copied here.

ABS: Total short term arrivals and departuresWhat this looks like to me is that in 2003, the number of Australians going overseas was a bit above 3 million, and in 2010 it was pretty close to 7 million. And thanks to a strong Aussie dollar, outbound tourism surged in 2011. So at least double. Probably quite a bit more.

So. Number of Australians being arrested overseas: double. Number of Australians going overseas: more than double. In other words, Australians are LESS LIKELY to be arrested overseas than they were a decade ago. Not more. Less.

Australian journalists make this kind of error all the time. They state a scary-sounding statistic without taking into account the population growth, inflation or a dozen other factors that provide context and usually rob the number of its shock power, because it actually shows that things are about the same or getting better.

That makes them either sensationalist or stupid. Either way, they’re doing a shit job.

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8

Australian journalists should give up and let someone competent have a go

By
Josh
– 8 December 2011Posted in: damned lies and statistics, media, money, politics

Father Chris Riley, founder of charity Youth Off the Streets, drew some flak yesterday for appearing in a Clubs Australia flyer endorsing the clubs industry’s opposition to the Government’s proposed poker machine regulations.

Riley has been an enthusiastic supporter of the clubs industry for many years, and works in partnership with them to do good charitable work. The clubs, in return, have been enthusiastic supporters of Youth Off the Streets. But just how enthusiastic have they been?

To counter the criticism that Riley is a shill for the clubs, he came prepared with a statistic to show how minimal their involvement was. Clubs’ donations to the charity were variously reported as 0.5% of total donations or 0.2% of the total budget. Insignificant, right? In a radio interview with Adam Spencer, he said the figure was 2%. Funny that it’s not the same figure, but it’s still no big deal.

In his submission to the Productivity Commission’s gambling inquiry, Riley proudly revealed his charity had received more than $3.5 million in funding from the clubs industry in the eight years from its inception to the submission in March 2009. That’s about $435,000 a year. Suddenly it’s not such small change.

For this figure to be 0.5% of total donations, Youth Off the Streets would have to be pulling in around $87.5 million a year. Sounds like a lot. And it is. In the 2009 financial year Youth Off the Streets received $8.3 million in donations and $6.8 million in 2008. One assumes they were lower in previous years, rather than higher.

It took me about five minutes of Google and high-school maths to discover, by its own figures, Youth Off the Streets did not receive 0.5% of total donations from the clubs industry. In fact, it was more than 5%. (I’m indebted to blogger cyenne for the link to the Productivity Commission submission.) If someone threatened to take away more than 5% of your income, you’d think twice, wouldn’t you?

So let’s be clear. Riley is spruiking for the clubs industry and lying about the extent to which said industry bankrolls the charity he runs. The information that proves he is lying is publicly available and easy to find. Does any of this get a run in the Australian media? Of course not.

Meanwhile, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has used the Big Four banks’ current (at time of writing) silence about cutting interest rates in line with the Reserve Bank’s cash rate as an excuse to beat up the government.

“(The banks) should be passing on rate cuts in full,” he said. “That’s what happened under the former government.”

Is that right? Not according to George Megalogenis, who wrote in today’s Australian:

The banks have consistently short-changed home borrowers over the past decade. The pattern of meanness repeats whether the Reserve Bank is easing or tightening monetary policy – some of the cuts are held back, while the increases are passed on with a premium.

One of them has to be wrong. Who do you believe?

Aside from George Megalogenis’s very roundabout criticism of Tony Abbott’s statement, no one in the media appears to have questioned it. They all quoted what Abbott said, because he said it, and that’s news. But is it true? Not my department, say the journalists.

And here’s the point, Australian journalists. If your entire intellectual value is being able to cut and paste from press releases and prepared statements in an interesting order, you’re doing a bang-up job. But if your job includes things like checking facts and doing research, even to a small degree, you should all be sacked, because you’re really shit at it.

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2

Sloppy, vague sentences are ‘the new normal’ for Australian newspapers

By
Josh
– 8 August 2011Posted in: media, politics, wordy things

Australian journalists either no longer know how to write clear, concise and grammatical sentences, or they no longer care.

Every day, in ever newspaper in the land, we read sloppy, vague sentences written in the passive voice with hazy attribution and bad grammar.

I’m going to pick on one example in particular, but if you think this is the exception, I’m happy to provide many others.

Kate Bracks and Michael Weldon celebrate. Picture: Channel 10

Kate Bracks and Michael Weldon celebrate. Picture: Channel 10

In the article ‘Viewers desert MasterChef finale amid programming backlash‘, Amanda Meade writes:

The third series of MasterChef Australia was decided last night with Bracks outperforming Adelaide film projectionist Michael Weldon to take out the title thanks to her version of a carrot sorbet snowman from Copenhagen’s famed Noma restaurant, considered the world’s best restaurant.

(Curiously, the same sentence appears word-for-word in this earlier article by Leo Shanahan and Michael Bodey. But newspapers often steal from themselves. Why reinvent the wheel?)

What’s wrong with it? Obviously it’s an unnecessarily long and complex multi-clause sentence that uses the weak ‘with’ to connect clauses. The second ‘restaurant’ is redundant. But the cracker is it actually contains not one but two passive verbs. In the one sentence! That’s talent.

You may argue that passive sentences are no big deal. ‘Lighten up, grammar head, it’s just the way people write nowadays, like, move with the times,’ you may say. And you are dead wrong. Idiot.

Passive verbs are not evil per se. But for a journalist, a passive sentence should be a crime because it deliberately conceals information.

Let’s take the first one: “The third series of MasterChef Australia was decided last night”. By whom was it decided? The judges, obviously; we can work that one out for ourselves without too much effort. But how much harder would it have been to say “Bracks won the third series of MasterChef Australia last night, outperforming Adelaide film projectionist …”? Just like that, disposing of the passive sentence, the vagueness about who decided the competition and the ugly ‘with’ connection, and saving two words in the process.

The second passive verb is the cracker. Noma is “considered the world’s best restaurant” by whom? Approximately 2.5 seconds of Googling gave me the answer to that: by the S.Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, published by Restaurant magazine. In fact, Noma has won this award two years running (a fact the MasterChef judges may even have mentioned on the show). But the author(s) was evidently too busy and important to add this detail, instead opting for the vague ‘considered’.

This is simply lazy. But worse, by eliminating attribution, it allows the author to editorialise. Instead of “considered the world’s best restaurant”, she (they) could just as easily have said “considered a rat-infested tourist trap which serves live slugs in engine grease”. By whom? Who knows? The journalist assumes we don’t care.

Journalists use the same trick all the time to insert opinions into what should be straight reporting. “The government program, considered to be a debacle…” or “The minister, considered to be an incompetent boob and serial child molester…” It doesn’t take long, reading Australian political journalism in particular, before you start seeing this happening again and again.

Which makes one wonder if firing all those sub-editors, and having editors whose only talent appears to be firing sub-editors (as opposed to editing articles), has been such a great idea.

(Obviously, Muphry’s Law dictates that there will be at least one grammatical or spelling error in this post.)

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8

The ten types of comments on news articles

By
Josh
– 1 August 2011Posted in: marketroids, media, techno-wankery, wordy things

One major criticism of reality TV shows, especially in the pre-MasterChef era, was they profited from encouraging and rewarding all the worst aspects of human behaviour. I think it’s time we recognised comments on online news and opinion websites have exactly the same problem.

It doesn’t take long before you start seeing the same people making the same kinds of comments over and over. The value to the publisher is obvious, in that it encourages readers to come back, click more articles, view more ads, buy more stuff. But what value, really, does it add for the reader?

Certain topics are guaranteed to bring out particular brands of loonies – think climate change or religion. But even reader comments on relatively innocuous topics are an incredibly effective stupidity concentrator.

Essentially, all reader comments on any article ever can be boiled down to one of the following:

  1. I had an opinion before I read this article. Since this article agrees with that opinion, it is an unbiased, worthy and well written article.
  2. I had an opinion before I read this article. Since this article disagrees with that opinion, it is illogical, biased nonsense.
  3. The parts of this article I disagree with are illogical nonsense. The parts I agree with are worthy points, well argued.
  4. Some completely irrelevant thing I am obsessed with surely proves this article correct/incorrect.
  5. This article surely proves some completely irrelevant thing I am obsessed with.
  6. Personally abusing and/or expressing sexual admiration for author, subject(s) of article and/or other commenters.
  7. The affiliations of the author who wrote this article allow us to discount anything it says.
  8. The bias of the publication in which the article appears allows us to discount anything it says.
  9. Immensely long and off-topic rant containing wild conspiracy theories and LARGE SECTIONS OF ALL CAPS.
  10. Repeating the same point five dozen other commenters already made and clearly demonstrating this commenter didn’t read any of the previous comments before mouthing off.

And…

  1. I had an opinion before I read this article. Because the article is logically argued and presents the evidence clearly and without bias, I am willing to concede I was wrong about this subject previously. [Note: this never happens]
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2

Why South American magic realist novelists shouldn’t write IT case studies (part 2)

By
Josh
– 20 July 2011Posted in: techno-wankery, wordy things

The story so far…

Grupo Nacional de Chocolates S.A invested heavily in technology for its food manufacturing business, but the machinery was beset by diabolical difficulties.

Solution

One clear and chilly winter morning, a flight of brightly coloured macaws circled the factory. After they had completed their one hundredth circuit of the high-walled compound, there arrived at the gates Desarrollo Sostenible, an elderly, wrinkled man with wispy white hair but eyes as clear and sharp as an infant’s. For as long as anyone could remember, he had travelled from village to village in his rickety cart drawn by a flea-bitten mule, dispensing knick knacks and folk remedies.

At the gate, he asked to speak to Marco Estratégico para el Actuación Corporativa, the company’s Director of Information Technology.

“I said, ‘Go away old man, we don’t need your witchcraft here’,” recounted Estratégico. “But he replied, ‘So, you don’t need help with your coffee beans turning into beetles? Your corn flakes becoming porn flakes? And your sausages that look like … you know what they look like.’

“I knew then that this old man had corporate learnings we could assimilate into our knowledge-based strategies moving forward.”

“Even 150-year-old wandering wise men need to visit the supermarket occasionally,” Sostenible said.

Estratégico and Sostenible ascended the four hundred steps to the company datacentre, at the top of the stone tower from which Colonel Sistemas Legado and his men held out in a heroic last stand against the army for 15 days and nights at the end of the revolutionary war.

“As soon as Desarrollo Sostenible entered the datacentre, the servers doused their flames, though the heat was still palpable,” said Estratégico.

Sostenible rummaged in his threadbare carpet bag and withdrew a small paintbrush and set of paints. He then proceeded to paint an uncannily accurate picture of an eye on the production control server. He repeated the process with the database server. He then began to chant in a deep voice that reverberated throughout the datacentre and over the whole factory.

“I couldn’t make out all the words he was saying, but it was something like ‘la ecología, la población local, el futuro’,” said Estratégico.

“Gradually a thick fog crept out of the forest to surround the datacentre tower. It started to seep through the cracks in the walls and settled around the servers.”

As this misty wet blanket smothered the passion of the servers, they began to work properly again.

“You don’t have to be a 250-year-old wise man to know you need two virtual eyes to prepare your datacentre for cloud computing,” explained Sostenible.

Business benefits

Sausages shaped like...With the servers no longer overheating, the production lines gradually resumed their normal operation, aside from the occasional flocks of butterflies from the pasta machine.

Grupo Nacional de Chocolates successfully expanded its operations into Ecuador and Venezuela. Estratégico then developed an innovative new product for the Brazilian market.

“The bonus payment and royalties I received for inventing deep-fried butterflies helped me gain my financial freedom,” he said.

“Finally I was able to marry my second cousin Estrategia de Comunicación, who I had loved in secret ever since I saw her swimming naked under the waterfall in the forest when we were teenagers, but our family forbade us to see each other and promised her to Barón de Ladrón.”

Having finished his work, Desarrollo Sostenible fed a few chocolates to the mule and packed up his decrepit cart, piled high with packets of sausages.

“They may not look appetising, but they are the most delicious sausages I have ever eaten in my 347 years,” he exclaimed.

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0

Why South American magic realist novelists shouldn’t write IT case studies

By
Josh
– 19 July 2011Posted in: techno-wankery, wordy things

Perched at the top of a towering cliff that plunges into the roiling waters of the North Pacific, at the edge of a teeming rainforest, is the headquarters of Grupo Nacional de Chocolates S.A., a leading manufacturer and distributor of confectionery-based solutions. The ancient, crumbling edifice dating back to the time of the conquistadors houses food processing facilities for chocolates; roasted and milled coffee; cereals; pasta; meat; sausages; candies; sugar; honey; and crackers.

I Can Do All Things by Julie Kirkland

Business situation

To support its expansion into Ecuador and Venezuela, Grupo Nacional de Chocolates invested in a $10 million solution based around gleaming machines that worked 24 hours a day and never went on strike. This enabled the company to redeploy 150 staff to higher-value activities. One day without warning, a troop of soldiers arrived at the workers’ camp at dawn and marched them into the forest, never to be seen again.

No sooner had this occurred, than the machinery began to experience diabolical difficulties.

“The manufacturing line we used for pasta started producing live butterflies instead of farfalle,” said Marco Estratégico para el Actuación Corporativa, the company’s Director of Information Technology. “Instead of jelly snakes, there were poisonous vipers. And don’t even ask what came out of the sausage machine.”

The control systems also suffered a range of performance and technical problems.

“The servers would burst into flames from the heat of their passions,” said Estratégico, a veteran of the revolutionary war. “I started to think this was a problem for which there was no end-to-end solution.”

Solution

One clear and chilly winter morning, a flight of brightly coloured macaws circled the factory. After they had completed one hundred circuits of the high-walled compound, there arrived at the gates Desarrollo Sostenible, an elderly, wrinkled man with wispy white hair but eyes as clear and sharp as an infant’s. For as long as anyone could remember, he had travelled from village to village in his rickety cart drawn by a flea-bitten mule, dispensing knick knacks and folk remedies.

[The story continues...]

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1

They’re old, they’re cranky and they know what they don’t like

By
Josh
– 24 March 2011Posted in: government, media

To add to the volumes already written about yesterday’s anti-carbon-tax rally, you have to wonder if Tony Abbott has any capacity for self-examination and if he does, did he stop for just a moment yesterday and think to himself, ‘If this is my core constituency, I’ve wasted my life’.

As usual, the media and/or Twitterverse obsessed about meaningless detail: should Abbott apologise for being photographed in front of a misogynist, ungrammatical sign that called the prime minister a bitch? Well, yes, but he was more the fool for being in front if it in the first place. And while the press corp was quick to criticise his media minders – Why didn’t they remove the sign? – they ignored the more pertinent question of why he was there in the first place.

To understand the topics that truly trouble the Coalition and their shock-jock buddies, you just need to listen. Any time they endlessly repeat a stock phrase, in unison, to every media outlet that will listen, you can be guaranteed the exact opposite is actually the case.

The more Abbott and his supporters endlessly drone that those attending the rally were a cross-section of middle Australians of all ages and backgrounds, the more it becomes obvious they were none of those things. They were, overwhelmingly, cranky superannuated white rednecks.

The presence of Pauline Hanson, One Nation and other far-right groups was no coincidence. Once again, I am indebted to Bernard Keane for putting it so aptly. These people were there:

not because there’s any endogenous link between xenophobia and climate denialism, but because it’s not really about climate change or immigration, but about social change and the social and economic transformation of Australia in a way that older, white Australians resent.

Australia has changed beyond recognition for them and because of their education levels and their age, they aren’t as well equipped to handle it as others are. They therefore feel disoriented, dispossessed and resentful … This is why there’s such a strong conspiracy theory fringe to climate denialism.

And it’s no surprise most Coalition pollies took a look at the assembled crowd and made damn sure they had some very important other things to attend to.

Because no politician who retains a shred of conscience could look into a crowd of cranky old bigots and say, ‘My political future rests with securing their votes and pandering to their prejudices – these are my people’.

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0

Not so sceptical my brains will fall out

By
Josh
– 23 March 2011Posted in: damned lies and statistics, nerds, scienticians, wordy things

Tim Dean has written a wonderfully reasonable and thoughtful piece on why conservatives are more likely to be climate change sceptics. I am somewhat more suspicious of their motives.

As you can imagine, this article provoked a flood of outraged, incendiary, irrational commentary from conservative climate change deniers.

Indeed, many climate deniers say their inability to face the facts of human-induced climate change stems from the most enlightened spirit of scientific rigour and critical thinking. As commenter ‘Unconvinced’ puts it:

You forgot the most important attributes of conservatives – the ability to think for themselves, and self-determination. Most of us will try to look at the evidence for ourselves not just blindly follow someone claiming authority.

That’s right folks, we should tip our hats and thank our lucky stars for contrarian free-thinkers like Unconvinced who bravely stand against the tide of public opinion and overwhelming evidence in the pursuit of truth, justice, Australia and cheap electricity.

Isn’t it simply breathtaking how many of these  über-intelligent experts in assessing scientific evidence choose to grace us with their wisdom in online comments? And how they all say exactly the same thing in exactly the same way, almost as though they’re reading from the same few sources?

You really have to marvel at the irony in the way they decry those who believe in climate change science as gullible sheep, even as they uncritically put their faith in unscientific climate-denier propaganda.

As Bernard Keane observes in Crikey:

Scepticism connotes a healthy willingness to be convinced if the evidence is sufficient, whereas of course no amount of evidence will ever convince critics of climate science, even as the evidence mounts and the numbers remorselessly add up to a warming planet. They’ll explain them away, make up their own data, reformat their graphs and cherrypick whatever data or explanations they can find — exactly as AIDS denialists and genocide denialists do.

Co-opting the language of scientific scepticism or contrarianism isn’t going to cut through the stench of those steaming piles of irony they’re trying to bury us under.

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1

The media’s credibility has already been nuked

By
Josh
– 16 March 2011Posted in: damned lies and statistics, media, scienticians

The situation in Fukushima is either a dire, Chernobyl-like disaster that will render vast sections of the Japanese coast uninhabitable for centuries or a minor incident that demonstrates the safety of well designed nuclear power plants. Sometimes both at once, if you believe the media.

Journalists, of course, have no idea about how a nuclear power plant works and lack the skills to judge the accuracy of anything anyone says. They’re on fairly safe ground if they stick to reporting the latest facts – there was an explosion at this reactor; that reactor was on fire but now isn’t; this agency said that; that company said this. But when it comes to trying to make sense of what’s going on, it’s all just he said, she said.

Most people commenting on the nuclear power plant situation in Japan are not nuclear-energy experts. They tend to sensationalise the situation because they’re more likely to get on TV, sell newspapers, attract clicks that way.

Most nuclear-energy experts work for the nuclear-energy industry either directly or as consultants. They tend to downplay the situation because they earn a living from telling people nuclear energy is safe.

Who has the knowledge to decide if any of these people are being honest and accurate? How many journalists who know almost nothing about the subject matter would back themselves to question the credibility of a talking head who sounds like s/he knows what s/he is talking about?

The media is clearly failing in its mission to explain to the public What This Means, but it’s hard to imagine how they might do a better job of it.

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