Sunday, March 21, 2010

“A Winter of Philosophy and Logic - Salon” plus 3 more

“A Winter of Philosophy and Logic - Salon” plus 3 more

A Winter of Philosophy and Logic - Salon

Posted: 21 Mar 2010 05:57 AM PDT

Winter has passed here in Alexandria and I wanted to reflect on a rich and productive Winter of readings in philosophy and logic. Early this Winter my friend and colleague Ralph Hodgson recommended Sting's new work If On A Winter's Night. As if awakening from that long dark night, I have much to share about a time of deep contemplation and thoughtful reflection.

If you follow my tweets, you saw some of it unfolding. Readings from and about Russell's theory of types provided insight into ramified type hierarchies that remain central to much of the Object Management Group and the World Wide Web Consortium's standards development. Proceeding through the development of type theory since Russell, constructive and intuitionistic logic became the central focus of my readings. I am very pleased with the amount of original material I was able to find on this subject. Brouwer's Intuitionism and Formalism is just one example. My bookmarks are worth browsing for these original materials.

A longer journey into type theory took me through Martin-Lof's impredicative and predicative type systems, Girard's Paradox and Coquand's Calculus of Constructions. These readings brought into focus as sharp as one might get at noon on a hot Summer's day, the past five years of our team's work on Model Driven Architecture and the Semantic Web. Following on Coquand's work, I progressed deeper into algebraic specifications with the EU's Common Algebraic Specification Language.

Most importantly, I made very good progress with tooling in each of these areas. Proof General is showing itself a very useful proof assistant. Haskell, Isabelle, oCAML and Coq all provide open source licensing that made it possible for me to get my hands dirty. It's all free. Free as in Freedom !

I'm confident enough with what I was able to accomplish this Winter that I registered the methodeutic.com domain name.

But Winter has passed and it's a warm Spring morning here in Alexandria. I'll talk more about this work over the next few months. Right now the Sping weather's so nice, I'm heading outside !

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Meet the candidates: District Court Judge race - Times-News

Posted: 21 Mar 2010 01:28 PM PDT

The following candidates are running for one district court judgeship up for grabs in the 15-A Judicial District. In an effort to inform readers about who they are, the Times-News asked the candidates to share some information about themselves.

Bradley Reid Allen Sr. has been a district court judge since 2000, when he was first appointed to the post. The Cummings High School graduate is running for a third term on the bench. Prior to his appointment, Allen worked as an assistant district attorney for over 10 years. In his time on the bench, he has presided over thousands of cases in criminal, civil, domestic and juvenile court as well as special proceedings. He obtained his law degree in 1988 from the Norman A. Wiggins School of Law at Campbell University.

He has been a speaker in several community events and served in a variety of boards and committees for community organizations to include the Alamance County Criminal Justice Partnership Program and the Alamance County Executive Law Enforcement Association. He has four children and lives in Burlington.

Shannon C. Peterson operates a civil law practice in Alamance County. She also contracts with Guilford County to represent the county's interests in child support enforcement court. A 1994 graduate the North Carolina Central Law School, Peterson also holds a psychology degree from East Carolina University. Throughout the years, she has served on boards and committees for a variety of community organizations including the Alamance County Children's Museum, Alamance-Caswell Hospice & Palliative Care and Alamance county Arts Council.

Past work experience includes working as an appeals referee for the Employment Security Commission of North Carolina and as a behavioral analyst for people with disabilities. She and husband John A. Peterson have been married for 13 years. The couple and their 8-year-old son live in Elon.

Why did you decide to run?

(Allen) I want Alamance County to continue to be a great place to live. Throughout my legal career I have been afforded the opportunity to help people. I have been told numerous times by people in the community that the decisions I have made and court orders I have entered have had a tremendous positive effect on their lives. This includes parents in child custody, child support, Department of Social Services and juvenile cases. Also, defendants in criminal cases have told me I have turned their lives around.

(Peterson) I have 16 years of legal experience primarily comprised of civil and administrative law as well as a variety of non-law work experiences. Over the years, my work and volunteer efforts have crossed racial, gender, age and socio-economic boundaries to improve the community I now call "home." My proven commitment to help others, my varied work experiences and personal respect for others make me uniquely qualified to serve on the bench with the integrity, respect and professionalism that the citizens, courtroom personnel and other participants deserve.

How would you rate the court system as it is now? What would you do differently?

(Allen) Overall, our court system is good. As with any organization there is always room for improvement. I would have more mediation programs to settle cases out of court with a goal of better long-term solutions. I would also require domestic cases to conduct settlement conferences with a judge to narrow issues and settle cases. This could avoid wasting parties, witnesses and court time. I would the district attorney along with input from the juvenile court counselor prioritize the types of juvenile cases that need the most attention to ensure quick, serious and effective response from the court.

(Peterson) Through initiatives like the Court Improvement Project, our courts have improved the handling of neglect, abuse and dependency cases. However, the court system provides additional opportunities for improvements n backlogged cases and overcrowded dockets. I would try to develop and implement processes to address those issues and encourage greater efficiency and consistency for the benefit of victims and witnesses whose rights often appear to be forgotten by our current system.

How would you describe your judicial philosophy?

(Allen) Firm but fair administration of law for every person regardless of race, color, creed, political affiliation or financial status. Court should be conducted with dignity and respect. Every person in the court system has a role and they must do their job to ensure cases are handled efficiently. As a judge, I must know the substantive law; the rules of evidence; how to conduct a trial; listen to the case; rule on objections; and then make an informed common-sense judgment based on the law.

(Peterson) It's difficult for me to separate my judicial philosophy from my personal philosophy. I have a history and appreciation for hard work and received the gift of humility through my upbringing. I've held many different roles and believe I can identify with others without diminishing the court's authority I am not perfect, but my strong work ethic, integrity, respect and compassion for others have worked well for me and will be the cornerstone of my judicial philosophy.

Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction.

New philosophy to make up for the syntax of the past - WA today

Posted: 21 Mar 2010 04:31 AM PDT

COMMENT

THE problem is huge: low levels of literacy among up to half of Australians. The solution: a new national school curriculum, literacy for the 21st century and, gasp, grammar.

Some say dropping grammar in the 1970s began the slide to today's textese - ''yng peeps cant rite proply''.

But many older Australians live with literacy levels lower than young people. The issue is the needs of people and the economy are changing and so is the curriculum.

Is boring old grammar the answer? Well, not really. It's a modern approach to grammar that's being introduced. And the ambitions are broad: lift children who slip through cracks in the education system to a level of reading and writing that reflects Australia's wealth.

Almost half of adult Australians have literacy skills lower than those needed to meet the demands of everyday life and work in a knowledge-based economy, Bureau of Statistics figures show.

Scarily, nearly two-thirds of those whose first language is not English scored below the minimum.

Even so, compared with other countries, Australia rates well on high-school students' scores in reading, maths and science tests. The problem is that achievement differs across the country - and between the disadvantaged and the better off. Last year's national tests reveal nearly one in three year 9 students in the Northern Territory is below the minimum standard in reading, writing, spelling and grammar and punctuation - they do not have rudimentary literacy skills. In NSW, about one in 10 students is at this low level.

The draft national curriculum puts grammar, spelling and punctuation at the centre of English teaching and learning. But why now?

Grammar was cut in the '70s because of a view it didn't help students' writing, said Dr Sally Humphrey from the University of Sydney's linguistics department.

''It was like, 'We're just going to give you building blocks; we're not going to show you how it works in text.''' The grammar starring in the new curriculum ''isn't a set of rules for 'correct' use'', she said, but ''a set of resources or a tool kit'' to be used according to the situation - whether it's texting, giving a presentation in class or writing a history essay.

''Each of those three situations would require different resources, different patternings of grammar, to do the job properly in that particular context,'' Dr Humphrey said. ''We want to give kids the grammatical resources for being able to do lots of different things.''

Reintroducing grammar was also part of an effort to strengthen the literacy of children from multilingual and disadvantaged backgrounds, said the lead adviser to the new English curriculum, Professor Peter Freebody from the University of Sydney. ''Our teachers and our systems are geared to doing well for the mainstream,'' he said. Imagine that school results, including literacy, are shaped like a tadpole. The fat body, representing the bulk of students, does well or quite well. But there's a long tail of people left behind.

Professor Freebody said students didn't learn to read by year 3 and then just build content knowledge. Different kinds of texts demanded different understandings, he said, ''and those things don't come free with the territory just because you're good at reading and writing when you're in year 3''.

While grammar's return may sound like going back to the '50s, the modern educator's knowledge of grammar, and its use for teaching ''reading and writing and enriching kids' understanding of content areas, that's not going backwards'', Professor Freebody said.

The new curriculum was arranged into three strands - language, literacy and literature - with grammar an ''integral component'' of each strand.

It's about ''letting kids in on the 'secret' of how good writers and good text producers do their work through the resources of language, through the resources of grammar - 'hey, this is how it's done!','' Dr Humphrey said. ''And that's an equity issue … Kids who haven't got access to middle-class homes and middle-class ways of using language that are valued in the schools, they do need [the workings of language] made explicit.''

The Australian Industry Group has highlighted the negative effect of low literacy and numeracy on productivity, safety and training. Group chief executive Heather Ridout said the new curriculum was ''a long overdue step, so we're strongly supportive of it''. Ms Ridout stressed the need for more specialist expertise in language across the board. ''We don't just not have it in schools; we don't have it in TAFE, in the VET sector, and we don't have it in the workforce.''

The draft curriculum is open for comment until May 23. You can find it at www.australiancurriculum.edu.au.

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Follow the leader - Sydney Morning Herald

Posted: 21 Mar 2010 12:37 PM PDT

Without a firm grasp of ideology, Coalition politicians have no way of making coherent policies.

ARE you confused by the state of centre-right politics in this country? Probably never more so than this fortnight.

Tony Abbott staked his claim in the climate change debate with a vocal dislike of great big new taxes. But now he's proposed his own. The opposition can't coherently claim that an emissions trading scheme is nothing more than a giant burden on business while at the same time imposing a different giant burden on business in the form of a big-business-financed parental leave scheme.

Perplexed? You're not alone.

In his March Quarterly Essay, ''What's Right? The Future of Conservatism in Australia,'' lawyer and academic Waleed Aly distinguishes between liberals, conservatives, neo-liberals and neo-conservatives. For Aly, the latter two aren't American-style ''nuke Iran for freedom'' neo-cons but a cross between social conservatives and free marketeers.

Then Aly finds liberal conservatives, cultural fundamentalists and neo-liberal neo-conservatives - which I think are the bad bits of all of the above. Clearly, a broad church is a complicated church.

I guess this bewildering catalogue of ideologies is some progress. For a lot of people, ''conservative'' seems to be used to describe anyone critical of the Labor Party, with the exception of Bob Brown.

To Aly, all this confusion is because there aren't any real conservatives left in Australia.

Conservatives value older institutions - such as the family and common law - not because they're old fuddy-duddies but because those institutions are the end product of centuries of trial and error. Sticking with what we know works is better than following the plan to reorganise society that you sketched on a pub coaster at 3am in the Elephant and Wheelbarrow last night. Even if you're really smart.

But Aly claims that the conservative temperament of hesitant, evolutionary change has been hijacked by crazy neo-liberals with their crazy free-market ideas.

If only.

The fanatically neo-liberal, deregulation-obsessed Howard government actually passed more pages of law than any previous government. Government is no smaller, no lower taxing, no more conducive to individual liberty than it was a decade ago. On many measures, it's worse.

There is no party in the Federal Parliament pushing anything near what has come to be called neo-liberalism - the potent combination of social liberalism and economic liberalism. There is no party explicitly arguing that government should stay out of both the boardroom and the bedroom.

Neo-liberals only like the free market because it allows individuals to pursue their own goals - just as other voluntary relationships, such as communities and clubs, do.

But the truth is there's very little ideology in Australian politics. Australia's political culture has always been somewhat apprehensive about obviously high-minded philosophies of government.

Australia's political institutions were formed in the mid-19th century, when utilitarianism was the height of ideological fashion.

Utilitarianism is an intensely practical political philosophy that says the purpose of government should be simply to seek the greatest good for the greatest number. No more, no less.

You might get fancy things such as individual liberty or social equality out of that. But, then again, you might not.

The contrast with the United States couldn't be stronger. America was founded at the height of the revolutionary period, when kings were killed for fanciful ideals.

Take the American Tea Party movement - a genuine, grassroots manifestation of deeply held political beliefs. Certainly, it's an uncomfortable coalition between serious right-of-centre activists and crazed conspiracy theorists pretty sure that President Barack Obama is a dastardly Muslim, but could you imagine any remotely similar movement in Australia?

The ideological passion - whether coherent or weird and manic - just isn't here. Even Australia's most aggressive public controversies are banally practical.

The boat-people controversy is just a debate about the most efficient way to process asylum seekers, not a debate about immigration or open borders.

Australia joined the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq because it was seen as a nice way to reinforce our bond with the US, not because of a dream for liberty in the Middle East.

The history and culture wars seem deeply ideological, but take this week's dispute over whether official events should be led by an acknowledgment of traditional Aboriginal owners. It's hardly a timeless philosophical struggle between value systems - just an inanely repetitive discussion about how ''proud'' we should be of the founding of the country.

Sure, our lack of ideological fervour sounds like a recipe for harmony. But without any philosophical beliefs about what government should - and, perhaps more importantly, shouldn't - do, Australian political parties tend to drift aimlessly. Especially in opposition.

Right now it seems the federal opposition has tried to substitute political philosophy with an incoherent populism.

To be fair, this is a problem that some in the Liberal Party seem to be aware of. Late last year, Queensland senator George Brandis made a speech championing the Liberal Party's small ''l'' liberal tradition, and shadow treasurer Joe Hockey felt moved this month to title a speech ''In defence of liberty''.

The conservatives, too, are trying to stake their claim. Tony Abbott's book, Battlelines, was supposed to be a definitive statement of conservative philosophy as it can be applied to Australia.

But in Abbott's tenure as Opposition Leader so far, Coalition policies have swung wildly between extremes. They're implacably opposed to carbon emissions trading - that would be an odious tax - but keenly supportive of carbon emissions regulation and subsidies, which, they seem to imagine, will be almost cost-free and of no economic consequence.

This policy incoherence isn't because they are blinded by a firmly held ideology. It's because they're blind without one.

Chris Berg is a research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs and editor of the IPA Review.

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