On Credibility of Sources – notes for a tutorial

by honxqp

1. Is there any source (written by a human) that we can trust absolutely? Answer is no, or at least we can’t be sure. I say ‘by humans’ because for some people a god may have written a text which is absolutely true. Avoiding getting into that. 2. What’s the problem with not trusting any [...]

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Why Australian media should improve poll reporting: an explanatory note on Margin of Error.

by honxqp

For good or ill – well, ill – polling has become a cornerstone of the Australian political process. This is not uncommon in and of itself: for nearly a century polling has been deployed in many countries as an instrument to measure public opinion, particularly with respect political parties, leaders, and their policies.  Australian political [...]

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Defining Propaganda: criteria and examples

The term ‘propaganda’ has negative connotations in modern communications, meaning that it sometimes seems to equate to ‘bad’ or ‘unethical’ communication.  But this won’t do as a definition: to then say that propaganda is defined as ‘bad persuasion’ is circular. Possible Criteria for propaganda The first possible and most obvious definition for propaganda is that [...]

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Why support for the Australian Government is currently unconscionable

In the Absence of a genuine Opposition prepared to take Government to task for its many transgressions, in the absence of a functioning Fourth Estate (ABC investigative journalism excepted), it falls to citizens to play both of these roles by proxy. For this reason a list of issues has been drawn up to draw attention to [...]

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The Posthuman (a lecture)

 ’In their ten-thousand, three hundred and ninth year of marriage, Leila and Jasim began contemplating death. They had known love, raised children, and witnessed the flourishing generations of their offspring. They had travelled to a dozen worlds and lived among a thousand cultures. They had educated themselves many times over, proved theorems, and acquired and [...]

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Regulation and Constraint of Online Discourse

‘We have a natural right to use our pens as we use our tongues – at our peril, risk and hazard.’ – Voltaire This note is a polemic of sorts, with the aim of making the case for a progressive view towards those rules of contempt of court that concern the discussion of cases, and [...]

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Politics of and Approaches to Risk (an overview)

 Politics and risk   In the broadest sense the concept of security, or capable risk management,  defines the range of services a State is contracted by its citizenry to provide. The discourse of risk, in public and official channels is intrinsic to political discourse as a result of the close relationship between authority, those submitting to [...]

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That all texts are the same text (if of similar length)

An elaborate (and literal) exemplar of Reductio ad Absurdum Philosophers muse on the ideal pre-emptive reading for an attempt to climb through clouds to the summits of Hegelian abstraction. Kant seems the most widely advocated precursor, Aristotle, Leibniz and Plato as well.  This line of thought suggests, though, in a general sense, that chance and [...]

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Why libertarianism’s absurd for (and hardly popular with) citizens in this country..

To embrace libertarianism, of any kind, is to say.. ‘Forget all the hard-won – very hard-won – gains of the past century, the minimum wage (currently $15.96), the penalty rates, the universal health care system, universal suffrage, universal primary and secondary education, universal access to tertiary education, welfare, pensions, services and subsidies for the elderly [...]

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eg

At t1 content represented by sentences of a text are evaluated against an existing or ground state of affairs provided by the relations and elements of t0 (taking the function of introducing a text in convenient isolation). If it is said that new propositional content is added at t1, representing an effect of a text, [...]

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