Andrew Bolt and Indifferentiation
Poor old Andrew Bolt. Those meanies on Hungry Beast were mean to him last night:
Hungry Beast item on the ABC does underline my point, however, and increase my concern that critics are now deceitfully using the stranger comments of some reader to define my own views and to delegitimise the ones I in fact hold and express. How dishonest this is may be judged by the fact that Hungry Beast item relied on about three or four comments plucked out from a thread of more than 300, written by Muslims, atheists, Christians and Jews, expressing all shades of opinion except my specific own.
Bolt has a point, but (to use his term) one that is rather delegitimised by his one-time annual sport of ridiculing the titles of successful ARC grants—always ones approved by the Humanities and Creative Arts panel.
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Tossing a grenade in the culture wars: The Australian at it again.
Ok, I don’t often go for a full spit on the blog, but this has really got my goat. On the front page of the Weekend Australian on 28 March, Justine Ferrari had an article titled ‘Teachers Bid to Downgrade Literature’ purporting to report the response of the Australian Association for the Teaching of English to the National Curriculum Board’s National English Curriculum: Framing Paper. (The response can be found here) Now I actually had cause to read both the Framing Paper and the Response the other day.
Does Everyone in the World Instant Message?
A study reported by the BBC claims that the largely discredited six degrees of separation theory might in fact be correct after all:
A US study of instant messaging suggests the theory that it takes only six steps to link everyone may be right – though seven seems more accurate.
The study which was published in March this year was conducted by researchers from Microsoft and looked at the addresses of 30 billion instant messages sent during a single month in 2006.
One of the researchers on the Microsoft Messenger project, Eric Horvitz, said he had been shocked by the results.
“What we’re seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity,” he was quoted as saying by the Washington Post newspaper.
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