Author Archive for peter

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Progress in computing

Published by peter on 2013-03-20 in Computer Science, Computer technology and Mathematics. 0 Comments

Computer science typically proceeds by first doing something, and then thinking carefully about it:    Engineering usually precedes theory.    Some examples:

  • The first programmable device in modern times was the Jacquard Loom, a textile loom that could weave different patterns depending on the instruction cards fed into it.   This machine dates from the first decade of the 19th century, but we did not have a formal, mathematical theory of programming until the 1960s.
  • Charles Babbage designed various machines to undertake automated calculations in the first half of the 19th century, but we did not have a mathematical theory of computation until Alan Turing’s film-projector model a century later.
  • We’ve had a fully-functioning, scalable, global network enabling multiple, asynchronous, parallel, sequential and interleaved interactions since Arpanet four decades ago, but we still lack a fully-developed mathematical theory of interaction.   In particular, Turing’s film projectors seem inadequate to model interactive computational processes, such as those where new inputs arrive or partial outputs are delivered before processing is complete, or those processes which are infinitely divisible and decentralizable, or nearly so.
  • The first mathematical theory of communications (due to Claude Shannon) dates only from the 1940s, and that theory explicitly ignores the meaning of messages.   In the half-century since, computer scientists have used speech act theory from the philosophy of language to develop semantic theories of interactive communication.  Arguably, however, we still lack a good formal, semantically-rich account of dialogs and utterances  about actions.  Yet, smoke signals were used for communications in ancient China, in ancient Greece, and in medieval-era southern Africa.

An important consequence of this feature of the discipline is that theory and practice are strongly coupled and symbiotic.   We need practice to test and validate our theories, of course.   But our theories are not (in general) theories of something found in Nature, but theories of practice and of the objects and processes created by practice.  Favouring theory over practice risks creating a sterile, infeasible discipline out of touch with reality – a glass bead game such as string theory or pre-Crash mathematical economics.   Favouring practice over theory risks losing the benefits of intelligent thought and modeling about practice, and thus inhibiting our understanding about limits to practice.   Neither can exist very long or effectively without the other.

Combining actions

Published by peter on 2013-03-14 in Computer Science, Decision theory, Joint-Action Society, Logic and Planning. 0 Comments

How might two actions be combined?  Well, depending on the actions, we may be able to do one action and then the other, or we may be able do the other and then the one, or maybe not.  We call such a combination a sequence or concatenation of the two actions.  In some cases, we may be able to do the two actions in parallel, both at the same time.  We may have to start them simultaneously, or we may be able to start one before the other.  Or, we may have to ensure they finish together, or that they jointly meet some other intermediate synchronization targets.

In some cases, we may be able to interleave them, doing part of one action, then part of the second, then part of the first again, what management consultants in telecommunications call multiplexing.   For many human physical activities – such as learning to play the piano or learning to play golf – interleaving is how parallel activities are first learnt and complex motor skills acquired:  first play a few bars of music on the piano with only the left hand, then the same bars with only the right, and keep practicing the hands on their own, and only after the two hands are each practiced individually do we try playing the piano with the two hands together.

Computer science, which I view as the science of delegation, knows a great deal about how actions may be combined, how they may be distributed across multiple actors, and what the meanings and consequences of these different combinations are likely to be. It is useful to have an exhaustive list of the possibilities. Let us suppose we have two actions, represented by A and B respectively. Then we may be able to do the following compound actions:

  • Sequence:  The execution of A followed by the execution of B, denoted A ; B
  • Iterate: A executed n times, denoted A ^ n  (This is sequential execution of a single action.)
  • Parallelize: Both A and B are executed together, denoted A & B
  • Interleave:  Action A is partly executed, followed by part-execution of B, followed by continued part-execution of A, etc, denoted A || B
  • Choose:  Either A is executed or B is executed but not both, denoted A v B
  • Combinations of the above:  For example, with interleaving, only one action is ever being executed at one time.  But it may be that the part-executions of A and B can overlap, so we have a combination of Parallel and Interleaved compositions of A and B.

Depending on the nature of the domain and the nature of the actions, not all of these compound actions may necessarily  be possible.  For instance, if action B has some pre-conditions before it can be executed, then the prior execution of A has to successfully achieve these pre-conditions in order for the sequence A ; B to be feasible.

This stuff may seem very nitty-gritty, but anyone who’s ever asked a teenager to do some task they don’t wish to do, will know all the variations in which a required task can be done after, or alongside, or intermittently with, or be replaced instead by, some other task the teen would prefer to do.    Machines, it turns out, are much like recalcitrant and literal-minded teenagers when it comes to commanding them to do stuff.

Taking a view vs. maximizing expected utility

Published by peter on 2013-03-13 in Decision theory, Forecasting, Planning, Probability theory and Uncertainty. 0 Comments

The standard or classical model in decision theory is called Maximum Expected Utility (MEU) theory, which I have excoriated here and here (and which Cosma Shalizi satirized here).   Its flaws and weaknesses for real decision-making have been pointed out by critics since its inception, six decades ago.  Despite this, the theory is still taught in economics classes and MBA programs as a normative model of decision-making.
A key feature of MEU is the decision-maker is required to identify ALL possible action options, and ALL consequential states of these options.   He or she then reasons ACROSS these consequences by adding together the utilites of the consquential states, weighted by the likelihood that each state will occur.
However, financial and business planners do something completely contrary to this in everyday financial and business modeling.   In developing a financial model for a major business decision or for a new venture, the collection of possible actions is usually infinite and the space of possible consequential states even more so.  Making human sense of the possible actions and the resulting consequential states is usually a key reason for undertaking the financial modeling activity, and so cannot be an input to the modeling.  Because of the explosion in the number states and in their internal complexity, business planners cannot articulate all the actions and all the states, nor even usually a subset of these beyond a mere handful.
Therefore, planners typically choose to model just 3 or 4 states – usually called cases or scenarios – with each of these combining a complex mix of (a) assumed actions, (b) assumed stakeholder responses and (c) environmental events and parameters.  The assumptions and parameter values are instantiated for each case, the model run, and  the outputs of the 3 or 4 cases compared with one another.  The process is usually repeated with different (but close) assumptions and parameter values, to gain a sense of the sensitivity of the model outputs to those assumptions.
Often the scenarios will be labeled “Best Case”, “Worst Case”, “Base Case”, etc to identify the broad underlying  principles that are used to make the relevant assumptions in each case.   Actually adopting a financial model for (say) a new venture means assuming that one of these cases is close enough to current reality and its likely future development in the domain under study- ie, that one case is realistic.   People in the finance world call this adoption of one case “taking a view” on the future.
Taking a view involves assuming (at least pro tem) that one trajectory (or one class of trajectories) describes the evolution of the states of some system.  Such betting on the future is the complete opposite cognitive behaviour to reasoning over all the possible states before choosing an action, which the protagonists of the MEU model insist we all do.   Yet the MEU model continues to be taught as a normative model for decision-making to MBA students who will spend their post-graduation life doing business planning by taking a view.
 

Mathematicians of the 20th Century

Published by peter on 2013-03-13 in Concats, Mathematics and Matherati. 0 Comments

With so many blogs being written by members of the literati, it’s not surprising that a widespread meme involves compiling lists of writers and books.  I’ve even succumbed to it myself.   Lists of mathematicians are not as common, so I thought I’d present a list of the 20th century greats.    Some of these are famous for a small number of contributions, or for work which is only narrow, while others have had impacts across many parts of mathematics.
Each major area of mathematics represented here (eg, category theory, computer science) could equally do with its own list, which perhaps I’ll manage in due course.  I’ve included David Hilbert, Felix Hausdorff and Bertrand Russell because their most influential works were published in the 20th century.  Although Hilbert reached adulthood in the 19th century, his address to the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris greatly influenced the research agenda of mathematicians for much of the 20th century, and his 1899 axiomatization of geometry (following the lead of Mario Pieri) influenced the century’s main style of doing mathematics.   For most of the 20th century, mathematics was much more abstract and more general than it had been in the previous two centuries.    This abstract style perhaps reached its zenith in the work of Bourbaki, Grothendieck, Eilenberg and Mac Lane, while the mathematics of Thurston, for example, was a throwback to the particularist, even perhaps anti-abstract, style of 19th century mathematics.  And Perelman’s major contributions have been in this century, of course.

  • David Hilbert (1862-1943)
  • Felix Hausdorff (1868-1942)
  • Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
  • Henri Lebesgue (1875-1941)
  • Godfrey Hardy (1877-1947)
  • LEJ (“Bertus”) Brouwer (1881-1966)
  • Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920)
  • Alonzo Church (1903-1995)
  • Andrei Kolmogorov (1903-1987)
  • John von Neumann (1903-1957)
  • Henri Cartan (1904-2008)
  • Kurt Gödel (1906-1978)
  • Saunders Mac Lane (1909-2005)
  • Leonid Kantorovich (1912-1986)
  • Alan Turing (1912-1954)
  • Samuel Eilenberg (1913-1998)
  • René Thom (1923-2002)
  • John Forbes Nash (1928-2015)
  • Alexander Grothendieck (1928-2014)
  • Michael Atiyah (1929- )
  • Steven Smale (1930- )
  • Paul Cohen (1934-2007)
  • Nicolas Bourbaki (1935- )
  • Sergei Novikov (1938- )
  • Stephen Cook (1939- )
  • William Thurston (1946-2012)
  • Edward Witten (1951- )
  • Andrew Wiles (1953- )
  • Richard Borcherds (1959- )
  • Grigori Perelman (1966- )
  • Vladimir Voevodsky (1966- )
  • Edward Frenkel (1968- )

And here’s my list of great mathematical ideas.

Let me count the ways

Published by peter on 2013-03-12 in Decision theory. 0 Comments

A cartoon I once saw had a manager asking his subordinate to list all the action-options available for some decision, then to list the pros and cons of each action-option and then to count them, pros and cons combined, and to choose the option with the highest combined total.  Thus, if one option A had 2 pros and 1 con, and another option B had 1 pro and 5 cons, the latter would be selected.   You might call this the Pointy-Haired Boss model of decision-making.
It is interesting to ask exactly why is this NOT a sensible way of deciding what to do in some situation.   Most of us would say that firstly, this method ignores the direction of the arguments for and against doing something – it flattens out the positive and negative nature of (respectively) the pros and the cons.   Even inserting positive and negative signs to the numbers of supporting arguments would be better:  Thus, option A would have +2 and -1, giving a net value of +1, while option B would have +1 and -5, giving a net value of -4; choosing option A over B on this basis would feel better, since we taking into account the direction of support or attack.
But even this additive approach ignores the strength of the support of each pro argument, and the strength of the attack of each con argument.    In other words, even the additive approach still flattens something – in this case, the importance of each pro or con.    We might then consider inserting some measure of value or importance to the arguments.  If they involve any uncertainty, then we might also add some measure of that in some form or other, whether quantitative (eg, probabilities) or qualitative (eg, linguistic labels).
But let us stay with the pointy-haired boss for a moment.   We have 3 arguments (2 pro, 1 con) under A, and 6 arguments (1 pro, 5 con) under B.   Why do we have more arguments for some options than for others?  It could be because we have thought about some options more than we have others, or because, through our own direct experience or observation of the experiences of others, we know more about the likely upsides and downsides of some options.   The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, for example, because we’ve not yet been over that side of the fence to see the mud there.   On our side, we can clearly see all the downsides as well as the ups.  Human decision biases may also lead us to emphasize the negative sides of more familiar situations, while emphasizing the positives of less familiar situations.
A model of decision-making I have proposed before – retroflexive decision-making – understands that real managers in real organizations making important decisions don’t generally have only the one pass at deciding the possible decision-options and articulating the pros and cons of each.  Rather, managers work iteratively and collectively, sharing their knowledge and experiences, drawing on wide sources, and usually seeking to build a consensus view.   In addition, they almost never work in a vacuum – rather, they work within a context of legacy policies and systems, with particular corporate strengths, experiences, skills, expertise, technologies, business partners, trading relationships, regulatory environments, and even personalities, and within overall intended future corporate directions.   All this context means that some decision-options will already be favoured and others disfavoured.   That much is human – and corporate – nature.   Consequently, decision-makers will naturally seek to strengthen the pros and the positive consequences of some options (including, but usually not only, the favoured ones), while weakening or mitigating their cons and negative consequences of those options.
None of this is wrong – in fact, it is good management.   Every decision-option in any even moderately complex domain will have both pros and cons.  Making work whichever option is selected will be a matter of finding ways to eliminate or mitigate the negative consequences, while at the same time seeking to strengthen the positive consequences.   Those options where we know more about the pros and cons are also likely to be the options where we have the greatest leverage from experience, knowledge, and expertise to accentuate the pros and to mitigate the cons.    To that extent, the Pointy-Haired Boss model is not necessarily as stupid as it may seem.

Composers concat

Published by peter on 2013-03-05 in Concats and Music. 0 Comments

While making lists of artists whose work speaks to me, here’s my list of classical composers likewise.  Of course, I don’t necessarily like everything these composers wrote.

  • Johann Adam Reincken (1643-1722)
  • Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750)
  • Johan Helmich Roman (1694-1758)
  • Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
  • Michael Haydn (1737-1806)
  • Johann Baptist Vanhal (1739-1813)
  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
  • Luigi Cherubini (1760-1842)
  • Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
  • Johann Hummel (1778-1837)
  • Franz Schubert (1797-1828)
  • Louise Farrenc (1804-1875)
  • Fanny Mendelssohn (1805-1847)
  • Juan Chrisostomo Arriaga (1806-1826)
  • Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
  • Robert Schumann (1810-1856)
  • William Sterndale Bennett (1816-1875)
  • Neils Gade (1817-1890)
  • Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893)
  • Antoni Stolpe (1851-1872)
  • Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
  • Alfred Hill (1869-1960)
  • Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)
  • Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953)
  • Colin McPhee (1900-1964)
  • Aram Khachaturian (1903–1978)
  • Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975)
  • John Cage (1912-1992)
  • Jim Penberthy (1917-1999)
  • Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)
  • Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006)
  • Morton Feldman (1926-1987)
  • Peter Sculthorpe  (1929-2014)
  • Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996)
  • Richard Meale (1932-2009)
  • Terry Riley (1935- )
  • Steve Reich (1936- )
  • Philip Glass (1937- )
  • Louis Andriessen (1939- )
  • Michael Nyman (1944- )
  • Barry Conyngham (1944- )
  • John Adams (1947- )
  • Akira Nishimura (1953- )
  • Cecilie Ore (1954- )
  • Pascal Dusapin (1955- )
  • Andrew McGuiness
  • Christophe Bertrand (1981-2010).

The alert reader will notice the absence of Richard Wagner.   This is deliberate.

The Yogyakartan Candidate

Published by peter on 2013-03-04 in Culture, History, Obama speeches, Politics and Post-Industrial Nomads. 0 Comments

An explanation of Bam’s aloof style and strategic cunning in terms of the idioms of traditional Javanese kingship, by Edward Fox in Aeon Magazine, here.   Fox could also have mentioned the first-term Cabinet of Rivals as another example of this idiom, absorbing one’s enemies.
An excerpt:

The Javanese have a word for this kind of bearing. They call it halus. The nearest literal equivalent in English might be ‘chivalrous’, which means not just finely mannered, but implies a complete code of noble behaviour and conduct. The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who wrote some of the most important studies of Javanese culture in English, defined halus in The Religion of Java (1976) as:
“Formality of bearing, restraint of expression, and bodily self-discipline … spontaneity or naturalness of gesture or speech is fitting only for those ‘not yet Javanese’ — ie, the mad, the simple-minded, and children.”
Even now, four decades after leaving Java, Obama exemplifies halus behaviour par excellence.
Halus is also the key characteristic of Javanese kingship, a tradition still followed by rulers of the modern state of Indonesia. During my period of study in Indonesia, I discovered that halus is the fundamental outward sign or proof of a ruler’s legitimacy. The tradition is described in ancient Javanese literature and in studies by modern anthropologists. The spirit of the halus ruler must burn with a constant flame, that is without (any outward) turbulence. In his classic essay, ‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’ (1990), the Indonesian scholar Benedict Anderson describes the ruler’s halus as:
“The quality of not being disturbed, spotted, uneven, or discoloured. Smoothness of spirit means self-control, smoothness of appearance means beauty and elegance, smoothness of behaviour means politeness and sensitivity. Conversely, the antithetical quality of being kasar means lack of control, irregularity, imbalance, disharmony, ugliness, coarseness, and impurity.”
One can see the clear distinction between Obama’s ostensibly aloof style of political negotiation in contrast to the aggressive, backslapping, physically overbearing political style of a president such as Lyndon Johnson.
Traditionally, the Javanese ruler triumphs over his adversary without even appearing to exert himself. His adversary must have been defeated already, as a consequence of the ruler’s total command over natural and human forces. This is a common theme in traditional Javanese drama, where the halus hero effortlessly triumphs over his kasar (literally, unrefined or uncivilised) enemy. ‘In the traditional battle scenes,’ Anderson notes:
“The contrast between the two becomes strikingly apparent in the slow, smooth, impassive and elegant movements of the satria [hero], who scarcely stirs from his place, and the acrobatic leaps, somersaults, shrieks, taunts, lunges, and rapid sallies of his demonic opponent. The clash is especially well-symbolised at the moment when the satria [hero] stands perfectly still, eyes downcast, apparently defenceless, while his demonic adversary repeatedly strikes at him with dagger, club, or sword — but to no avail. The concentrated power of the satria [hero] makes him invulnerable.”
Even to seem to exert himself is vulgar, yet he wins. This style of confrontation echoes that first famous live TV debate in the election of 2012 between Obama and Romney, in which Obama seemed passive, with eyes downcast, apparently defenceless (some alleged ‘broken’) in the face of his enemy, only to triumph in later debates and in the election itself.
Like a Javanese king, Obama has never taken on a political fight that he has not, arguably, already won
But such a disposition is not just external posturing. Halus in a Javanese ruler is the outward sign of a visible inner harmony which gathers and concentrates power in him personally. In the West, we might call this charisma. Crucially, in the Javanese idea of kingship, the ruler does not conquer opposing political forces, but absorbs them all under himself. In the words of Anderson again, the Javanese ruler has ‘the ability to contain opposites and to absorb his adversaries’. The goal is a unity of power that spreads throughout the kingdom. To allow a multiplicity of contending forces in the kingdom is a sign of weakness. Power is achieved through spiritual discipline — yoga-like and ascetic practices. The ruler seeks nothing for himself; if he acquires wealth, it is a by-product of power. To actively seek wealth is a spiritual weakness, as is selfishness or any other personal motive other than the good of the kingdom.”

 

Multi-parliamentarians

Published by peter on 2013-03-04 in History and Politics. 0 Comments

The death of Joan Child reminded me of a fellow MP of hers who had served in both the British House of Commons and the Australian House of Representatives.   I thus thought it interesting to list people who had been elected to two or more parliaments or assemblies (excluding those belonging to both national and regional assemblies from federations,  such as the European Parliament, Australia, etc), and those elected to parliaments of successor states (such as Rhodesia and Zimbabwe).

  • Adolf Berman (1906-1978), Polish Sejm (Polish Workers Party, c. 1945-1950) and the Israeli Knesset (Mapam – United Workers Party and later Maki – Communist Party of Israel, 1951-1955).
  • Stanley Melbourne Bruce, 1st Viscount Bruce of Melbourne (1883-1967), Australian House of Representatives (Nationalist Party and United Australia Party, 1918-1933) and British House of Lords (Life Peerage, 1947-1967).  Bruce was the first Australian member of the House of Lords.
  • Hugh Childers (1827-1896), appointed member of the Legislative Council of the colony of Victoria (1852-1856) and elected member of the inaugural Victorian Legislative Assembly (November 1856-February 1857), then elected member of the British House of Commons (1860-1892, peripatetically). In Britain, Childers held various senior ministerial positions in administrations of William Gladstone, including Secretary of State for War, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Home Secretary. Childers was the great-grandson of Sir Sampson Gideon, later Sampson Eardley, 1st Baron Eardley (1744-1824), the first British MP of Jewish descent (an MP from 1770-1802).
  • Mathias Corman (born in Belgium, 1970), Senator for Western Australia (2007-2020) and Commonwealth Minister for Finance (2013-2020), who was briefly a member of the municipal council of German-speaking Raeran, Leige, Belgium, before migrating to Australia in 1994.
  • Sir Charles Gavan Duffy (1816-1903), Member of the UK House of Commons for the Irish seat of New Ross (1852-1855) and Member of the Legislative Assembly of the Nation of Victoria (1856-1880).  Duffy, a Roman Catholic, was Premier of Victoria (1871-1872) and Speaker of the House of Assembly (1877-1880).  One of his sons, Sir Frank Gavan Duffy (1852-1936) became Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia (1931-1935), while another son, George Gavan Duffy (1882-1951) became Minister of Foreign Affairs of Eire (1922) and President of the High Court of Eire (1946-1951).
  • Albert Hawke (1900-1986), member of the South Australian House of Assembly (1924-1927) and of the Western Australian House of Assembly (1933-1968). Premier of Western Australia (1953-1959). Uncle of Australian Prime Minister Robert James Lee Hawke (1983-1991).
  • Godfrey Huggins, 1st Viscount Malvern (1883-1971), elected member of the House of Assembly of Southern Rhodesia 1924-1953, Prime Minister 1933-1953, elected member of the Federal Parliament and Prime Minister of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland 1953-1956, appointed member of the British House of Lords 1955-1971. As he remained in Rhodesia following his retirement in 1956, it is not clear if Malvern ever sat in the Lords.
  • Marthinus Pretorius (1819-1901), President of the South African Republic (aka the Transvaal, 1857-September 1860, 1864-1871, 1880-1883) and for a period in 1860 simultaneously President of the Orange Free State (January 1860-1863).
  • Sir George Reid (1845-1918), twelfth Premier of New South Wales (1894-1899) and fourth Prime Minister of Australia (1904-1905), was a member of the Australian Commonwealth House of Representatives (1901-1909) and a member of the British House of Commons (1916-1918).
  • Sir Robert Richard Torrens (1814-1884), third Premier of South Australia (1857), was a member of the South Australian House of Assembly from 1851-1863 (initially appointed, then elected) and an elected member of the British House of Commons for Cambridge from 1868-1874. He created the land registration system known as Torrens Title.
  • William Yates (1921-2010), British House of Commons (Conservative and Unionist Party, 1955-1966) and the Australian House of Representatives (Liberal Party, 1975-1980).

Others who almost make this list are:

  • Daniel Cohn-Bendit (1945- ), Member of the European Parliament (1994-2014).  From 1994-1999 and again from 2004-2009, Cohn-Bendit was elected an MEP from Germany, while from 1999-2004 and again from 2009-2014, he was elected an MEP from France.  He could readily have been elected to both the French and the German national parliaments. With a German father and a French mother, he qualified for citizenship from both countries, but opted as an adult for German citizenship, apparently to avoid French military service. De Gaulle then had him deported.
  • Andrew Clarke (1824-1902), Appointed member of the Legislative Council of Victoria (1853-1856), elected Member of the Legislative Assembly of Victoria (1856-1858), contested the constituency of Chatham in the British House of Commons in 1886 and 1892, both times unsuccessfully.  In between times, Clarke was Governor of Singapore and Governor of the Straits Settlements, 1873-1875.
  • Graça Machel, First Lady of two countries, Mozambique (as wife of Samora Machel) and South Africa (as wife of Nelson Mandela).
  • Thomas Paine (1737-1809), who was secretary to the Committee on Foreign Affairs of (but not a delegate to) the Second Continental Congress (of the United States) and was a member of the French National Convention (1792-1793).
  • Ian Paisley (1926-2014), who was an elected member variously of the British House of Commons, the Northern Ireland Assembly, and the European Parliament, and could probably also have been elected, had he so wished, to the Scottish Parliament.
  • Sir Garfield Todd (1908-2002), elected member of the House of Assembly of Southern Rhodesia (1948-1958, including Prime Minister, 1953-1958), appointed a Senator in the Senate of Zimbabwe (1980-1985).  Todd was born in New Zealand, whose Government arranged for his knighthood.  In an act of spite of the Mugabe regime, his Zimbabwean citizenship was revoked in 2002. His PA at the time of his premiership, Susan Woodhouse, wrote an authorized biography of Todd that was published in 2018, 60 years after his term of office ended. (Susan Woodhouse: “Garfield Todd: The End of the Liberal Dream in Rhodesia.” Weaver Press, 2018.)

Vale: Joan Child

Published by peter on 2013-03-04 in Obituaries and Politics. 0 Comments

Child-Joan-Speaker
The death has occurred of Mrs Joan Child (1921-2013), first female Speaker of the Australian House of Representatives (1986-1989) and Labor MHR for Henty in Melbourne (1974-1975, 1980-1990).  She was the first female Labor Party MHR, and only the fourth woman elected to the House.   That it took 73 years for the Australian Labor Party to elect a woman to the Lower House of Federal Parliament is quite telling about attitudes in the Party and in the wider society.  As Speaker, she refused to wear the traditional wig and gown, and was always very down-to-earth.   On the evening before the Queen’s opening of the new Australian Commonwealth Parliament House in 1988, for instance, Madame Speaker Child could be found relaxing where she often went – having a drink and playing the pokies at the Canberra Labor Club.  She was always quite approachable there, too.
Her SMH obit is here.
POSTSCRIPT (2013-03-29):  Here is James Button, son of former Labor Industry Minister, Senator John Button, writing about the ALP:

Outside Albania, was there ever a more macho party than the old ALP?  Its first female member of the House of Representatives, Joan Child, was not elected until 1974, thirty-one years after Enid Lyons became the first female conservative MP.  It was a party that prized hardness, humour, guts and aggression:  men who could hold their drink, hold their tongue when they had to, and hold their own in argument.  Its language was vivid, often vulgar.  Doing the numbers for Hawke, his backer Graham Richardson once said, was ‘better than sex and almost as exciting as a good feed’.”  (Button 2013, page 126 of large print edition)

James Button [2012]: Speechless:  A Year in my Father’s Business.  Melbourne, Australia:  Melbourne University Press.

Artists concat

Published by peter on 2013-03-04 in Art, Concats, Creativity and Culture. 0 Comments

Here is a listing of visual artists whose work speaks to me.  Minimalists and geometric abstractionists are over-represented, relative to their population in the world.  In due course, I will add posts about each of them.

  • Carel Fabritius (1622-1654)
  • Shi Tao (1641-1720)
  • Jin Nong (1687-c.1763)
  • Richard Wilson (1714-1782)
  • Thomas Jones (1742-1803)
  • Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849)
  • Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840)
  • John Sell Cotman (1782-1842)
  • Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858)
  • Thomas Cole (1801-1848)
  • Richard Parkes Bonington (1802–1828)
  • Thomas Chambers (1808-1869)
  • Thomas Moran (1837-1926)
  • Arkhip Kuindzhi (1842-1910)
  • Robert Delaunay (1885-1941)
  • Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943)
  • Alma Thomas (1891-1978)
  • Stuart Davis (1892-1964)
  • Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack (1893-1965)
  • László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946)
  • Kotozuka Eiichi (1906-1979)
  • Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912–2004)
  • Agnes Martin (1912-2004)
  • Jackson Pollock (1912–1956)
  • Gunther Gerzso (1915-2000)
  • Michael Kidner (1917-2009)
  • Guanzhong Wu (1919–2010)
  • Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923- )
  • Fred Williams (1927-1982)
  • Donald Judd (1928-1994)
  • Sol LeWitt (1928-2007)
  • Henry Munyaradzi (1931-1998)
  • Bridget Riley (1931- )
  • Norval Morrisseau (1932–2007)
  • Dan Flavin (1933-1996)
  • Patrick Tjungurrayi (1935-2018)
  • Jean-Pierre Bertrand (1937- )
  • Peter Campus (1937- )
  • Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980)
  • Prince of Wales Midpul (c.1937-2002)
  • Peter Struycken (1939- )
  • Alighiero e Boetti (1940-1994)
  • Alice Nampitjinpa (1943- )
  • Helicopter Tjungurrayi (1947- )
  • Cildo Meireles (1948- )
  • Jeremy Annear (1949- )
  • Louise van Terheijden (1954- )
  • Doreen Reid Nakamarra (1955-2009)
  • Peter Doig (1959- )
  • Katie Allen
  • Els van ‘t Klooster (1985- )
  • Este MacLeod