Back and forth the pendulum of history swings. First the Aborigines in Australia were savages to be pitied, then they were victims who were pitilessly killed by white colonists – then 18 months ago Keith Windschuttle, a conservative historian wrote a stinging rebuke to those historians who strove to uncover the dark side of Australia’s history, claiming that they appear to have exaggerated or made up the evidence of those crimes. Not surprisingly, it has touched off “a furore”:http://www.sydneyline.com/.

The Australian brings us “up to date with the controversy”:http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,10205639%255E28737,00.html in a manner rather sympathetic to Windschuttle. I don’t know whether he’s right or wrong but the Australian historical establishment’s seeming desire to circle the wagons and attack the man and the media rather than his allegations is un-edifying. It seems to be having the unfortunate effect of turning him into a “martyr among conservative bloggers”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=sydneyline.com.

I hope someone from the Australian historical establishment will come by and make a good case for why things are not as they have been painted by the media and Windschuttle himself…

WebSM (where SM stands for survey methods), ‘is dedicated to the methodological issues of Web surveys, but it also covers the broader area of interaction between modern technologies and survey data collection.’ It chiefly provides a collection of bibliographic references and some full text. Though the site itself is academic a fair amount of the papers are produced by and/or aimed at marketers. It has an index of survey software suppliers but this isn’t very handy as it doesn’t seem to include free software and is only organized by country.

Free commercial hosts for online surveys include my3q (don’t be put off by the Korean – it offers up to 5 questionnaires without question number or respondent number limits!), SurveyMonkey (their free service handles 10 questions and 100 responses), Zoomerang (free up to 30 questions, 100 responses but results stored for limited period). QuestionPro has a particularly good student offer – you can conduct one survey free of charge with unlimited questions and up to 5000 responses as long as you cite them publicly and link to their site from your project.

Castle is a suite of quiz software (adaptable presumably to other survey use) which is created for UK higher academics to use (free of charge) but appears to generate CGI scripts which must then be uploaded to your own server. GetFAST is similarly designed to help teachers get assessments from their students and allows for up to 20 questions but could also be adapted for more broad use I imagine.

I recall learning about a service run by a US university somewhere that was also free for academic use but I can’t remember where it is.

Later… While my3q is tempting I just realised that it doesn’t appear to let you download the results- you have to rely on their web stats which limits its usefulness. Advanced Survey at $25 a month (approx) looks pretty good but it isn’t clear if they support branching – for example, if my respondents answer yes to question 1 then don’t show them questions 2-4.

Zoomerang has a discount for educators for its full version I see ($99 for 3 months) and appears to do branching and allow downloading. QuestionPro allows branching and downloading of data but the non-academic free trial option only captures 25 respondents over a single month.

The Camwear Model 100 from Deja View stores the last 30 seconds of what you’ve been looking at continuously – you press a button and it saves it to a memory card. I’ve been waiting for a gadget like this for a long time (though I’ll wait for a version that is cheaper, less obtrusive and stores enough to be useful!). Also see “this CNET piece”:http://news.com.com/TiVo-like+camcorder+documents+your+life/2100-1041_3-5230733.html about it.

It’s a little weird and off-centre but this post to fafblog has convinced me it is funny enough often enough to be worth adding to my “blogroll”:http://www.bloglines.com/public/derb/. I can’t explain it you have to take a look yourself…

Thanks to “Alex Halavais”:http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=767 for plugging Fafblog until I started to find it funny

A poll of polls organised by Electoral Vote. Of course if the ludicrous results of the last election had caused America to “change this absurd system”:http://www.electionreform.org/ERMain/priorities/ec/default.htm we wouldn’t need a special additional set of calculations to figure out who is winning but since no change seems likely here’s a tool to help figure out what is going on. Of course it’s much to early yet to read much into it but I will be watching it anxiously closer to November.

As an instinctive free trader I am pleased to read that the World trade talks have reached agreement but I hope the developed world follows through promptly on its promise to eliminate some subsidies at a “date to be set”.

I was somewhat surprised to see the BBC essentially pushing the neo-liberal ‘party line’ though, saying, for example:

According to the World Bank, a successful final deal could add $520bn (£280bn; 420bn euros) to the world economy by 2015, if rich and developing countries cut their tariffs. Most of the benefit would, the World Bank believes, go to poorer countries.

Personally I believe this to be true but it’s hardly an uncontested claim. While there is discussion of “the iniquity of developed world farm subsidy”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3183139.stm (for example) I couldn’t find a part of the BBC’s news site (at least not the part linked from the front-page story) where they give space to the broader claims of the (self-proclaimed) “global justice movement”:http://www.weareeverywhere.org/ that free trade harms the poor more than it helps them.

Actually I am curious – where on the Internet should I look for a reasoned argument that free trade (free on both sides not just free entry to poorer countries by the rich) would be bad for the poorer ones?