Archive for category Science

Mental health and markets: two kinds of failure

by David F on 31 January 2010
Categories: Health, Science, Society, Technology |

It’s nice that the Federal Government has given a gong to Pat McGorry, but our country’s commitment to psychiatric treatment remains at the level of mere lip service. I read with interest a recent newspaper article reporting on the Federal Government’s scheme for giving subsidies to private psychologists. This program began in 2006, in response to widespread evidence of a ‘crisis’ in mental health. Psychiatric problems constituted a vast percentage of overall health burden in Australia, yet were systematically under-funded (in proportional terms). The then-Howard Government arranged for psychologists operating in private practice to be subject to Medicare rebates for the first time. The aim here was to allow the private system to pick up the slack for an over-burdened public system. These are the results:

MEDICARE spending on psychological therapy will blow out to $1.5 billion by 2011, twice its budget allocation, according to a new analysis.

Despite the huge investment – three times the original five-year estimates when the scheme began in 2006 – the Federal Government has not released any evidence that the consultations are improving mental health…

Long consultations with psychologists grew fastest – by 32 per cent. But they were used disproportionately by city dwellers, with country people only about 60 per cent as likely to attend them.

The analysis also shows patients are being hit by out-of-pocket expenses likely to be prohibitive for those on lower incomes – an average $35 for 50 minutes with a psychologist.

This result is not surprising, and I’d like to touch on two related points to elucidate the origins of this costly failure:

Read the rest of this entry »

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In his balloon

by Molesworth on 29 November 2009
Categories: Environment, Politics, Science | Tags: , , , ,

While the Liberals are embroiled in a simply delicious leadership crisis as the tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists try to hijack the party, it’s worth taking a look at this enlightening Tony Abbott interview on Lateline which took place not ten days ago:

TONY JONES: I hear what you’re saying about the earth having been hotter in different periods in its entire global history, but let me ask you this. Have you read the science that we’re talking about here – for example, have you read the IPCC’s report?

TONY ABBOTT: No, I don’t claim to have immersed myself deeply in all of these documents. I’m a politician. I have to rely on briefings – I have to rely on what I pick up through the secondary sources.

But look, I think I am as well versed on these matters as your average politician needs to be.

TONY JONES: But you have read Ian Plimer’s book.

TONY ABBOTT: I haven’t yet finished Ian Plimer’s book. I have started Ian Plimer’s book.

TONY JONES: But you have quoted it from time to time.

TONY ABBOTT: I’ve quoted a couple of passages, and I confess I’m probably more familiar with the book through people who’ve written about it than I am through having read it myself.

TONY JONES: What evidence do you have then for saying that the earth has cooled since the late 1990s.

TONY ABBOTT: Well, I am not setting myself up as the great expert here, but the Hadley Institute in Britain, which is apparently one of the most reputable of these measuring centres, according to press reports, has found that after heating up very significantly in the previous 25 years, there seems to have been a slight cooling, but at a high plateau I’ll accept that.

TONY JONES: That is Ian Plimer’s argument. So when you actually go…

TONY ABBOTT: This is the Hadley Centre – this is measurements.

TONY JONES: I’m about to tell you what the Hadley Centre actually says. When you go and look at what it says about global temperatures you’ll find that they say that the years 1998 to 2006 include the hottest, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth and the sixth hottest years in recorded history.

TONY ABBOTT: And the hottest one was at the beginning and the less hot ones have been since.

And it goes on. To summarise:

  • Tony Abbott has not read the IPCC report.
  • But he has read Heaven & Earth.
  • But he’s only started it.
  • But he’s capable of reciting whole passages of it at the drop of a hat even though he hasn’t read it.
  • This is because he’s familiar with the book having read people who have written about it.

This is why Andrew Bolt being the intellectual beacon of Liberals is a good thing.

Bring on the next election.

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So some academics’ emails have been hacked …

by David F on 23 November 2009
Categories: Environment, Science | Tags: , , ,

… and a lot of conservatives and right-wing ‘libertarians’ are getting very excited. It seems a hacker has obtained the private email correspondence of researchers who were looking at AGW. The candid comments found therein (always quoted out of context by said conservatives/libertarians, of course) are supposedly further proof that claims about AGW are merely a hoax, and that the science is a scam.

From what I can see of the emails, they prove no such thing. What they do demonstrate, however, is that scientists, and science itself, are fallible, and subject to the vicissitudes of personality and politics (broadly speaking), just like every other aspect of life. To construct an entire conspiracy theory out of this decades-old fact is to therefore be clutching at straws.

None of this ought to be news for the conservatarians, or anybody else, for that matter, except the former have an irrational fear and hatred of all things that smell even vaguely pomo. Because of this, some fairly basic points, such as science being fallible, or occurring within a context that is full of contingencies, are likely to be new and unfamiliar, despite these points having been made, in different ways,  some time ago.

Indeed, Kuhn argued long ago that ‘more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection data’, and that ‘personal and historical accident is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time’.

Note also that, whatever the purported sins of these AGW scientists from East Bumcrack, their scientific failings are utterly trivial when compared to the shenanigans of Big Pharma, for instance, about whom the conservatarians are entirely silent.

We can expect to see plenty more about this on the blogosphere. (Larvatus Prodeo has a thread here — the comments are interesting, though the post itself pulls its punches, IMHO). This is what constitutes a scientific scandal when an entire generation of computer-literate conservatarians have been getting their ’science’ from Andrew Bolt and Ann Coulter.

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