Catallaxy Files

Crime happens when the police (and the community) have a tolerant attitude towards criminal behaviour. This tolerance is likely to increase when people think that poverty and inequality are the root causes of criminal behaviour. The WSJ has a fantastic take-down of this view.

If crime was a rational response to income inequality, the thinking went, government can best fight it through social services and wealth redistribution, not through arrests and incarceration.
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The Compstat mentality is the opposite of root causes excuse-making; it holds that policing can and must control crime for the sake of urban economic viability. More and more police chiefs have adopted the Compstat philosophy of crime-fighting and the information-based policing techniques that it spawned. Their success in lowering crime shows that the government can control antisocial behavior and provide public safety through enforcing the rule of law. Moreover, the state has the moral right and obligation to do so, regardless of economic conditions or income inequality.

Contrast this approach with Victorian Police Commissioner Simon Overland.

Some of these crimes are racially motivated. However, I also believe that many of the robberies and other crimes of violence are simply opportunistic.

We know that a lot of international students work and study late at night and are often travelling home by themselves on trains, equipped with their laptops and phones.

Unfortunately, they are often just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That might be true; but it doesn’t suggest that he is being very proactive about preventing crime. (I admit that could be an unfair characterisation.)

This morning Rococo Liberal suggested that the government should finance the ABC by a television licence fee. Well government have uped the ante. People in rural areas will have to pay $300, or more, to watch free to air television.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy today confirmed the government would spend $40 million a year over the next four years to roll out the new digital television service for viewers in regional blackspots.

He hailed the decision as dramatically improving services in the bush and ensuring regional viewers have access to the same services as those in the city.

But any regional households not able to receive digital television from upgraded self-help sites will be served by the new satellite and will need to install a satellite dish.

Eligible householders will secure a $300 subsidy to the $600 cost, leaving them with a $300 bill.

Those not eligible will need to pay $600.

The changeover from analogue to digital in regional areas including Mildura, Broken Hill, Mt Gambier and the Riverland will commence from July 1, leaving families that fail to upgrade without television.

I think we have established that peer review is not a worthwhile process of quality control for scholarly papers.

Still, there needs to be something. Take this “research” reported in the Guardian and picked up by the Australian Fairfax papers. The conclusion seems to have been that listening to “pro-social” (sorry for all the quote marks – I can’t let readers think these are my words) songs makes you act act more nicely soon after.

His experiments took groups of students and split them at random into those who listened individually either to socially-conscious songs or those with a neutral message, and then used various ways to measure the apparent effect. In one, after the music had stopped, a researcher “accidentally” knocked a cup of pencils from a table and paused briefly before beginning to collect them.

On average, those who had heard songs like Michael Jackson’s Heal the World responded more quickly and picked up almost five times as many pencils as people in the other group.

What should be done about dopey stuff like this? How about a kind of peer ridicule? An academic Hall of Infamy? I’ll bet it pops up again in one of those “numerous studies have shown…” stories.

Unmatched, though, is the paper by postmodern teacher of nursing Dave Holmes from 2006 concluding that evidenced based medicine is fascist because it excludes other ways of knowing. The paper is here and is worth reading right through. You might laugh or grind your teeth in anger.

The Bureau of Meterology claim that 2009 is the second hottest year on record. One part of the story did jump out at me (emphasis added).

Extreme heatwaves across southern Australia during late January/early February set a new Melbourne maximum temperature record of 46.4C, new State maximum temperature records for Victoria (48.8C at Hopetoun) and Tasmania (42.2C at Scamander), and contributing to the Black Saturday bushfires.

It is a bit premature to blame the Black Saturday fires on an ‘ extreme heatwave’ when a Royal Commission of Inquiry has yet to report. Furthermore while it was hot in February – its called summer – it wasn’t unusually hot. In fact my memory, apart from a few consecutive hot days, I thought last February was cool. The Bureau of Meterology confirms my suspicions.

As hot February’s go it was cool. That is confirmed when I look at the mean temperature for the month too.

The data for January (max, mean) don’t support the ‘extreme heatwave’ hypothesis either.

Update: Rog points us to this piece by David Karoly who talks about the climatic conditions. Ben O’Neill talks about some of the institutional conditions.
Update II: More government error.

There has been some debate as to whether the CRU had been hacked or whether an insider released the information. It now looks like it was an insider.

Canadian network engineer Lance Levsen, the UNIX systems administrator for the PW Group, a major Canadian publishing firm, has generated a detailed forensic analysis of the released e-mails and files.

The Saskatoon, Saskatchewan-based Levsen re-created the e-mail distribution system at UEA over the last ten years, capturing system changes by the university’s e-mail administrators during that time. Using information contained within the files that constitute the e-mails, as well as the filenames themselves, his modeling concludes and identifies the source for the leaked documents as an internal source within the University of East Anglia. The alleged “hacker”, Levson conludes, must have been someone with administrative, or “root” privileges, to UEA’s secure computer systems.

The original post can be found here.

For the hacker to have collected all of this information s/he would have required extraordinary capabilities. The hacker would have to crack an Administrative file server to get to the emails and crack numerous workstations, desktops, and servers to get the documents. The hacker would have to map the complete UEA network to find out who was at what station and what services that station offered. S/he would have had to develop or implement exploits for each machine and operating system without knowing beforehand whether there was anything good on the machine worth collecting.

The only reasonable explanation for the archive being in this state is that the FOI Officer at the University was practising due diligence. The UEA was collecting data that couldn’t be sheltered and they created FOIA2009.zip.

It is most likely that the FOI Officer at the University put it on an anonymous ftp server or that it resided on a shared folder that many people had access to and some curious individual looked at it.
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The simplest explanation in this case is that someone at UEA found it and released it to the wild and the release of FOIA2009.zip wasn’t because of some hacker, but because of a leak from UEA by a person with scruples.

While we’re on the topic of insiders, whistleblowers and people with scuples it is worth comparing the CRU insider with Bradley Birkenfeld. So far the CRU insider has not identified themself nor attempted to plea-bargain for a lessor sentence following a guilty plea to a criminal offence. Rather the CRU insider has released important information to the world for no personal gain (that we have yet to see).
(HT: Offsetting Behaviour)
Update: Mitchell Porter points out that this isn’t a new story. The bottom line seems to revolve around who is correct in this exchange.

The US government’s pursuit of tax havens has been disgraceful. The problem arises when government attempts to exert its authority beyond its own national borders. We then arrive at the strange situation where government can exercise authority unconstrained by domestic courts. Consider for example the so-called Pacific Solution. The Australian government is able to detain individuals without those individuals having access to the Australian legal system to challenge decisions made by Australian government officials. The US facility at Guantanamo Bay has similar features. The logic that government can act extraterritorially also gives rise to the argument that it can tax assets and income extraterritorially.

But we know there should be strong and clear limits to government to avoid oppression. Tax havens play an important role in creating those limits. For people uncomfortable by this type of argument, there is the utilitarian argument that tax havens also facilitate greater investment and economic efficiency. The American government overstepped a very imporant limitation when it forced UBS to give up the names of suspected US tax cheats. Bear in mind these people have not been found guilty of an offence, merely suspected of an offence due to having a foreign bank account.

Why does this matter? After all the US is generally a force for good and can’t really be described as being an oppressive regime. The problem is that a system of partial disclosure requires Swiss authorities to make a judgement call on the activities of their banking clients and the oppressiveness of foreign governments. A secrecy or non-disclosure policy requires no such judgement call on the part of the Swiss.

But there is some good news out of this sordid affair. The original ‘whistleblower’ is going to jail.

A FORMER banker with UBS who triggered a huge tax-evasion inquiry by the American authorities into his employer’s business will go to jail this week after failing to secure a deal over a sentence imposed on him last August.

Bradley Birkenfeld had pleaded guilty in 2008 to helping a UBS client — Igor Olenicoff, a property developer in California — to evade taxes, but in a plea bargain with prosecutors he agreed to reveal more information about tax evasion in the Swiss banking group in return for a lighter sentence.

Overnight, however, a federal judge, William Zloch, refused to postpone prison or consider a lighter sentence than the one of 40 months handed down in August and ordered Birkenfeld to report to jail on Friday.
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Birkenfeld, an American citizen who lived in Switzerland for 15 years, appeared on a television show on Sunday and in his first public interview said: “I gave them the biggest tax-fraud case in the world. I exposed 19,000 international criminals. And I’m going to jail for that?”

To say that he exposed 19,000 criminals is a very long bow. He exposed the inappropriateness of bad tax policy and has exposed the citizens of oppressive regimes to government confiscation of their property.