Linkage

Jacob Smith, from Rights and Security International, a human rights advocacy group, said: “For years, we have expressed concern about how the government’s broad concept of ‘extremism’ could be open to politicised abuses. It appears that this concern has now been realised through a blatant distinction between how the government wants to treat people on the ‘left’ versus people on the ‘right’ under Prevent.

“Our concern is only heightened by government rhetoric during the past few days that appears to be targeting British Muslims and protesters for Palestinian rights. If ‘extremism’ can mean anything the government wants it to mean, that’s a clear problem for democracy.”

Ilyas Nagdee, from Amnesty International, said: “This is yet another crackdown from the UK government to stifle freedom of expression – including political speech and activism – using the blunt instrument that is Prevent.

“Prevent is brazenly being used here to target political expression as it has long been criticised of doing. The government should not be in the business of rolling out training and guidance on what they deem acceptable or unacceptable political ideologies and forms of activism.”

HP has launched in “All-In Plan”. It is an “all-inclusvie printing subscription that delivers the ultimate in convenience.” In the subscription, you choose one of three different printers and that’s it. You set it up, you print, and when ink runs out, they’ll send you more. It’s similar to Instant Ink, but this time they throw in the printer.

The three printers you get to choose from are as follows:

   HP Envy for $6.99/month
   HP Envy Inspire for $8.99/month
   HP OfficeJet Pro for $12.99/month

Now, don’t get me wrong, getting into the subscription is simplicity itself. And given the cost of ink cartridges, the math on these printers isn’t so bad.

But here’s were the bad news comes in. The prices I quoted are only for the “light” printing plan. That plan limits you to printing on 20 pages a month.

House size differs markedly around the world, ranging from 9m² per person in India, to about 84m² per person in Australia. Globally, floor area per person is increasing.

Our study set out to examine the significance of this increase when it comes to home heating and cooling energy requirements in Australia. 

[…]

We found a home designed in 2022 had a 7.6% larger conditioned floor area than a home designed in 2018. And a home designed in 2022 was predicted to require 10% more energy for heating and cooling than a home designed four years earlier.

Professor Wray explores the origins and nature of money from the #MMT perspective.

In this exceptionally thought provoking session Professor Wray links money to debt. He explains the historical connection between the the invention of writing as a way to keep track of credits and debits.

Neural nets are typically trained by “supervised learning”. So they’re presented with many examples of an input and the desired output, and then gradually the connection weights are adjusted until the network “learns” to produce the desired output.

To learn a language task, a neural net may be presented with a sentence one word at a time, and will slowly learns to predict the next word in the sequence.

This is very different from how humans typically learn. Most human learning is “unsupervised”, which means we’re not explicitly told what the “right” response is for a given stimulus. We have to work this out ourselves. 

While negative gearing gets all the hate, it really was John Howard who destroyed our housing market by handing out a big tax-free gift to property investors.

Prior to June 2000, if you made a capital gain (ie a profit from an investment) you discounted the profits by the level of inflation over the period of the investment before paying tax.

Then Howard (and Costello) changed it to being a straight 50% discount.

If you bought a property for $500,000 and 10 years later you’re able to sell it for $1m at a profit of $500,000, rather than pay tax on the whole $500,000, you only pay tax on $250,000. The other $250,000 is yours, tax free.

That is about as sweet as it gets.

[…]

At some point you have to admit what you’re doing has not worked. Or perhaps we need to admit that the aim all along was higher house prices.

Howard infamously said in 2003: “I don’t get people stopping me in the street and saying, ‘John you’re outrageous, under your government the value of my house has increased’.”

The tax policies he put in place worked. They ensured house prices would go up much faster than income and reduce affordability. Maybe it’s time to admit that if we keep them in place that situation will continue.

• In short: Data detailing the air quality at Melbourne's Southern Cross Station has been released for the first time.
• It shows nitrogen dioxide levels in parts of the station have regularly been more than 90 times the guidelines set by the World Health Organization.
• The Victorian government and the station's operator say they've been meeting Australian workplace standards.

My first budget day as a trader was in 2009. There was still a Labour government back then and Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown were adamant it was time to tax bankers’ bonuses. I was a banker but a very poor, very young one. Around that time I slept on a broken mattress and used a little plastic hose from Argos to take showers while sitting in the bath.

I was worried. But I turned round to Billy, and Billy wasn’t worried. He was laughing. He was leaning back, pointing at me, and laughing. He stood up and grabbed me hard by the shoulders. “Don’t worry, Gal. They’ll never tax us,” he said.

Organisations such as the Muslim Council of Britain and protest groups such as Palestine Action are among those that could be affected by the non-statutory move to block groups from funding or accessing venues if they are regarded as promoting an ideology that undermines “British values”. The plan was reported by the Observer last year.

A minister said on Tuesday that he would not be happy if, for example, gender-critical feminists were labelled as extremists by a change of government policy.

The trade minister Greg Hands told Times Radio that the prime minister had talked about taking on extremism and the government needed to work on definitions.

“The communities secretary, Michael Gove, is doing that right now. More work is being done. But obviously we need to target real extremism and not just a difference of views, honestly held views about these things,” he added.

A remarkable body of research over many years has demonstrated that the sort of teaching in which students are provided with answers or shown the correct way to do something — where they’re basically seen as empty receptacles to be filled with facts or skills — tends to be much less effective than some variant of student-centered learning that involves inquiry or discovery, in which students play an active role in constructing meaning for themselves and with one another.

[…]

Now put yourself in the place of one of those hard-liners who want teachers to remain the center of gravity in the classroom, disgorging information. How might you circle the wagons despite all the research that undercuts your position? Even more audaciously, how could you try to get away with saying DI is “evidence-based” or supported by the “science of learning” — a favorite rhetorical gambit of traditionalists?

To the rescue comes an idea called cognitive load theory (CLT). This concept, primarily associated with an Australian educational psychologist named John Sweller, basically holds that trying to figure things out for yourself uses up so much working memory that too little is left to move whatever has been learned into long-term memory. It’s therefore more efficient for the teacher just to show students problems that have already been worked out correctly or provide them with “process sheets” that list step-by-step instructions for producing the right answer. (Imagine Jack Nicholson as the cognitive load theorist, hollering at students, “Inquiry? Your brain can’t handle inquiry!”)