INTHITS 2: Franzen Need

There are two types of climate denialism. The first type, practised by Liberals and Republicans and Murdoch hacks, is to deny the science, to deny that humans have been and are continuing to heat the planet in an unsustainable manner. The second type, practised by pretty much everyone else, is to deny the politics and the psychology, to deny that human society appears incapable of altering its behaviour sufficiently to deal with scientific reality.

TheĀ New Yorker has just published an essay by Jonathan Franzen on this second type of denialism, on the refusal to confront our current and impending death. Franzen’s essay is gentle, heartfelt, pleading and depressing. The essay, along with its author, has also been condemned far and wide.

Franzen’s essay has not convinced me that we are doomed. Much more convincing has been the vicious and fundamentally empty response, which does nothing so much as to prove Franzen’s point.

VCAA’s Mathematical Reasoning

OK, Dear Readers, turn off the footy and/or the cricket. You have work to do.

We have written before of VCAA‘s manipulative “review” of Victoria’s senior mathematics curriculum, complete with scale-thumbing, push-polling and hidden, hand-picked “experts”. Now, according to their latest Bulletin,

[t]he VCAA will undertake a second phase of Stage 1 consultation …

Good. With any luck, the VCAA will subsequently get stuck on the nth phase of Stage 1, and Victoria can be spared their Potemkin Mathematics for another decade or so.

Still, it is strange. The VCAA has indicated nothing of substance about the results of the first phase of consultation. Why not? And, what is the supposed purpose of this second phase? What is the true purpose? According to the VCAA, one of two reasons for Phase Two is

to further investigate [t]he role of aspects of mathematical reasoning and working mathematically in each of the types of mathematics studies.

(The second reason concerns “Foundation Mathematics” which, try as we might, we just cannot pretend any interest.)

As part of this new consultation, VCAA has posted a new paper, and set up a new questionnaire (and PDF here), until 16 September.

And now, Dear Readers, your work begins:

  • Please fill in the questionnaire.
  • Please (attempt to) read VCAA’s new paper and, if you can make any sense of it whatsoever, please comment to this effect below.

We suspect, however, that this is all a game, disguising the true purpose of Phase Two. It’d be easier to be sure if the VCAA had reported anything of substance about the results of Phase One, but we can still hazard a pretty good guess. As one of our colleagues conjectured,

“There was probably sufficient lack of support [in Phase One] for some radical departure from the norm, and so they will take longer to figure out how to make that happen.”

That is, although the VCAA’s nonsense received significant pushback, the VCAA haven’t remotely given up on it and are simply trying to wait out and wear down the opposition. And, since the VCAA controls the money and the process and the “experts” and the “key stakeholders” and the reporting and everything else except public sentiment, they will probably win.

But they should be made to earn it.

WitCH 21: Just Following Orders

This WitCH come courtesy of a smart VCE student. It concerns the newly instituted VCE subject of Algorithmics, and comes from the 2017 exam:

The Examiners’ Report indicates that half of students gave the intended answer of A, and notes

It is important for students to understand that Big-O notation describes an upper bound, and so is only used for analysis of worst-case running times.

Have fun.