Increasing Australia's annual ICU capacity by 10 times at an initial outlay of $ 35 Billion would have cost 5-7 times less than Morrison & Co's "whatever it takes" Wuhan/COVID19 virus strategy, currently costing $350 Billion

by Ganesh Sahathevan



Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the state premiers, especially Gladys Berejiklian of NSW and Daniel Andrews of Victoria have not in the past two months to let us know how much in taxpayers money they are prepared to throw away to "fight" the Wuhan/COVID19 virus.

They have collectively committed to spend in the next three to six months in excess of $ 360 Billion in order to do "whatever it takes" to "save lives".
Much of the spending has been justified on the basis that they need time to build Australia's ICU capacity. The cost involved in doing has never been mentioned.


In an article published in the Medical Journal Of Australia in September 2019 the cost of operating ICU beds in Australia is approximately $2 Billion per annum.:

“The mean cost per patient bed-day for all contributing ICUs in 2013-2014 was $4375. Today in 2019 this would almost $5000,” Litton and colleagues reported.

“Higher ICU bed number and occupancy were each significantly associated with lower costs per patient bed-day; bed number did not influence annual cost per bed.

“The estimated total annual operational cost for ICU care in Australia was $2.119 billion, about 0.15% of gross domestic product and 1.4% of total health care costs. Staffing accounted for about 80% of ICU operational costs. Larger ICUs were associated with lower costs for medical staff but not for nursing staff.”

The above does not include set-up costs, which have been independently estimated by this writer to be approximately $500,000 per bed. Dan Andrews of Victoria has said that Victoria would have needed 10,000 ICU beds. If that number is multiplied across every state, the whole country would have needed 70,000 beds. Assuming that these are all new beds the cost of providing the new beds would  be $35 Billion. 

Assuming that the increased ICU capacity does not include efficiency savings, the estimated total annual operational cost for ICU care in Australia would be $20 Billion, at peak rates of  infection.It does not seem likely, from what is reported in Europe, China and the US, that there would be a need for ongoing ICU support at the peak rate.Therefore the total expenditure would be about $55 Billion. 

This is approximately 5-7 times less than the $265-360 Billion (and counting:) that Morrison and Co will spend in six months, inflicting in the process other very high economic costs, still unaccounted for, of "hibernating" the entire economy.

END 

Surge capacity of Australian intensive care units associated with COVID-19 admissions

Australia's Andrew Bolt raises more issues about Australia's judiciary which will concern foreign investors: Politically linked appointments reminiscent of Malaysia's Eusoffe Chin era cannot give investors assurance of competency, impartiality

Comment 



Former Law Council president Arthur Moses saw  promotion of the rule of law in Asia as one of the LCA's priorities.. He

See first 

Australia's reputation as a rule based safe haven for investment further tainted by judiciary attacking media: Judges' association reaction to media reporting on the Pell decision reminiscent of Malaysia's Eusoffe Chin era

Australia's reputation as a rule based safe haven for investment tainted by errant judges: Pell decision reveals a judicial system where the influential can rely on court processes to achieve desired outcomes

And now read on:

'I'M NO CRIMINAL LAWYER'. 

YET HE DARED JUDGE PELL

Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun

April 18, 2020 10:39am

One of scandals in the jailing of the innocent George Pell is that Victoria's two most senior judges turned down his appeal, overruling the third - Mark Weinberg, our greatest authority on criminal law. 

Now Chris Merritt reports on a stunning admission:

One of the two judges of the Victorian Court of Appeal who ­upheld George Pell’s wrongful conviction for assaulting choirboys was appointed to the bench after stating publicly that he was not a criminal lawyer.

The Victorian government selected Court of Appeal president Chris Maxwell after a career that included working for a federal Labor frontbencher and running a politically charged legal challenge against the Howard government.

Less than three years before his appointment, Justice Maxwell told a Senate committee he was not a criminal lawyer and deferred to another lawyer with expertise in this area of law.

In November 2002, when he was the immediate past president of Liberty Victoria, he gave evidence to a Senate inquiry into a proposed counter-terrorism law along with Gregory Connellan, who succeeded him as head of ­Liberty Victoria.

The Hansard record shows the then Mr Maxwell told the Senate inquiry: “As I was president when we sent in our submission, Greg and I will deal with the issues together. Greg is a criminal lawyer, which I am not,” he told the ­committee.

In a later part of his testimony, he said Mr Connellan was “particularly well informed on issues of criminal procedure and investi­gation … Greg will deal with the criminal stuff”.

When discussing whether a terror suspect could be detained, he said: “Greg can say whether this is feasible as a matter of criminal procedure.”

In a ruling that has raised concerns about Victoria’s system of criminal justice, the High Court this month unanimously overturned Justice Maxwell’s joint judgment with Chief Justice Anne Ferguson in the Pell case and freed the cardinal after 405 days in jail.

Legal academic Mirko Bagaric said he would never suggest that Justice Maxwell’s appointment was other than meritorious but he was surprised, given the complexity of the Pell case, that the majority judges had not deferred to dissenting judge Mark Weinberg, who he said was the nation’s greatest authority on criminal law.

“I was surprised that the two other judges thought that their analysis, and their take on the facts as applicable to the law, were more likely to be superior and more accurate than that of the leading criminal jurist in the country,” said Professor Bagaric, who is dean of law at Swinburne University.

Chief Justice Ferguson is a former commercial litigator and partner at national law firm Allens. She has never practised as a barrister. She was appointed chief justice in 2014, four years after joining the Supreme Court...

Justice Maxwell’s concession that he was not a criminal lawyer took place less than three years ­before he was appointed in July 2005 [by the Bracks Labor Government] to lead the Court of Appeal.

As well as working as a barrister in London and a silk in Melbourne, he had been principal private secretary to former Labor senator Gareth Evans, who was attorney-general and foreign minister under Bob Hawke.

Justice Maxwell had come to national prominence in 2001 when he and former Greens candidate Julian Burnside QC ran an unsuccessful challenge against the Howard government’s handling of the Tampa affair.

Given his professed lack of expertise in criminal law, why did Maxwell feel qualified to sit on the Pell appeal? Even more surprising is that he then felt qualified to overrule - with Ferguson - the compelling dissent by Mark Weinberg, and dismiss Pell's appeal.

That decision looks even stranger now that the High Court has relied strongly on Weinberg's dissent to overturn the Maxwell-Ferguson ruling, which it criticised repeatedly, not least for making the fundamental error of reversing the onus of proof, so that Pell had to prove his own innocence.

But Maxwell and Ferguson also made very basic errors that seem to me to be the direct result of their inexperience in criminal law.

One was in seeming to trust too much in someone's guileless face than on the hard evidence showing that what he's saying is highly unlikely, if not downright impossible.

Again and again, Maxwell and Ferguson made clear they were relying heavily on the accuser's demeanour:

[His evidence] was rightly characterised as compelling, both because of the clarity and cogency of what A said and because of the complete absence of any indication of contrivance in the emotion which A conveyed when giving his answers.

Weinberg tried to warn Maxwell and Ferguson in his dissenting judgment against trying to judge truth from someone's face or way of talking (as anyone who'd spent years listening to criminals, including many plausible liars, would have learned):

Clearly, it is important to be aware of the risk of giving too much credence to matters such as demeanour, when evaluating the evidence of a witness. In the past, there has been a great deal of misplaced confidence in the capacity of a judge, or any other decision-maker, to discern the truth, on the basis of demeanour alone.

The High Court has observed that it can be dangerous to place too much reliance upon the appearance of a witness, rather than focusing, so far as possible, upon other, more objectively reliable matters. These might include, for example, contemporary documents, clearly established facts, scientifically approved tests, and the apparent logic of the events in question.

Empirical evidence has cast serious doubts upon the capacity of any human being to tell truth from falsehood merely from the observations of a witness giving evidence. That is particularly so in the artificial and stressful circumstances of a courtroom. There is today a substantial body of scholarly writing which cautions against giving too much weight to demeanour when assessing the probative value of evidence.

But Maxwell and Ferguson thought they knew better. Thought they could judge the accuser by his demeanour.

In fact, they were so struck by the demeanour of Pell's lone and unsupported accuser that they even treated the massive implausibilities in his story as evidence that he was actually telling the truth and not fabricating. They wrote:

In testing the fabrication hypothesis, it is relevant that there were features of A’s account which — had he been fabricating — he might have been expected to construct differently. For example, it might be thought surprising that — on A’s account — Cardinal Pell did not close the door after entering the Priests’ Sacristy [before allegedly raping them in his busy Cathedral, straight after Mass].

But, as already noted, A said he could not recall whether it was closed or not. He thought it was not ‘wide open’. In our view, the jury could properly reason that a person fabricating a story would have been more likely to say that the door was closed, precisely in order to remove the potential difficulty of explaining how it was that noises made inside were not heard outside.

How could Pell ever win against reasoning like that, when the very things that made the claims against him seem far fetched were treated by the judges as evidence of his accuser's honesty!!!!

Maxwell and Ferguson also failed in one other spectacular and mystifying way. Neither seemed to see that the evidence of both Pell's witnesses as well as of the accuser himself made clear that the rapes could not have happened as alleged. Neither Pell nor the boys could have been at the scene of the alleged crime at the only time that Maxwell and Ferguson agreed the crime was possible. How could they have missed that?

YOUTUBE

For all these reasons, including Maxwell's past admission about his inexperience in criminal law, this gross miscarriage of justice against Pell cannot be swept under the carpet.

It cannot be dismissed, as the Victorian Bar pathetically seemed to argue this week, as just one of those understandable differences of opinion between the High Court and Victoria's Court of Appeal, and one that worked out all right in the end.

Former Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett has called on Maxwell and Ferguson to resign. I cannot see why he is wrong.

iFlytek & Huawei formed a strategic partnership in 2018, collaborated since 2010: NSW LPAB , Law Council Australia still silent about their approval of Zhu Minshen's Law School & his business with iFlytek given the Uyghur persecution

by Ganesh Sahathevan

Zhu Minshen and his Top Education Group Ltd's business with iFlytek is still of no concern to the NSW Legal Profession Admission Board, TEQSA and the Law Council Australia, despite iFlytek being sanctioned in the United States. The US banned iFlytek for its part in the Chinese Government's persecution of Xinjiang's Uyghurs.

The fact that iFlytek has actively collaborated with Huwaei since 2010 is  also it seems of no concern to the NSW LPAB which is chaired by the Chief Justice of NSW, Tom Bathurst. 

Bathurst, the Law Council Of Australia and the Attorney General of NSW Mark Speakman are primarily responsible for granting  Zhu and his law school entry into the  NSW and Australian legal establishment, despite his links to the Communist Party of China,and his undermining of the authority of the Australian Federal Police.

TO BE READ WITH


iFlytek: The voice of AI

2018.09.19 By Xu Shenglan, Xue Hua

AI is on a clear upward trajectory and is reshaping all aspects of life. According to Hu Yu, Executive President and Consumer BG President of iFlytek, AI is starting to approach human intelligence.  Serving hundreds of millions of users with its world-leading technologies, iFlytek started off as a pioneer in China’s voice recognition industry and has now evolved into a global leader in AI. But it all started with a little twist of fate.

From intelligent voice to Super Brain

Founded in 1999, iFlytek’s primary goal was to make machines talk, something that even today is reflected in the company’s mission: “We want the world to hear our voice.” And that’s starting to happen – the company is now at the forefront of the AI phenomenon.

Hu smiles as he recalls, “We had no idea at the time that we were working on AI. At least we weren’t sure what AI really was. We also weren’t aware that 1999 was a bad year for AI, as the second wave of AI innovation had just peaked.” Slightly tongue-in-cheek, he says, “If we’d known that AI was going to be such a tough business, we might never have started the company. I guess it was just fate.”

Around 2004, AI wasn’t the hot tech it is today, says Hu, but his team had come to realize that they were holding a key piece of AI. “The biggest difference between human intelligence and animal or machine intelligence is cognitive intelligence. It comes from our mastery of language and how we express knowledge, which allows us to do logical reasoning and complex decision-making,” he says. The cognitive revolution around voice and language, Hu believes, is the peak of human intelligence and the biggest challenge for AI today.

Hu is the leader of the iFlytek Super Brain Project, which was launched in 2014, “It’s much more than just a fancy name. We announced our definition of AI as computational intelligence.” He asserts that machines were much more powerful than humans since the day they were invented, citing AIs that play the board game Go as an example of computational intelligence. “Humanoid machines possess both perceptual intelligence and motion intelligence. That means they can see, hear, and feel the surrounding world. Today there are some impressive humanoid and animal-like machines,” he says.  “However, the reason we’re at the top of the planet’s food chain is language, or ‘cognitive intelligence’.” According to Hu, one of the goals of the Super Brain Project is to evolve machines from the level of perceptual intelligence, where they can hear, talk, see, and recognize, to the level of cognitive intelligence, where they can understand and think.

Currently, Super Brain is using big data to train and optimize its algorithms. They’re not trained by simply cramming all kinds of data into the system; instead, the system actively processes data from interactions in real-world scenarios, and uses that data to update itself. Hu believes this style of self-enhancement is like the ripple effect, where the volume of data grows exponentially as the product reaches more people, enabling his team to more rapidly iterate and optimize the product experience. 

No shortage of awards

iFlytek boasts leading tech in areas like speech synthesis, voice recognition, voice assessment, and translation. From 2005 to now, the company has racked up 13 consecutive wins at the Blizzard Challenge, the world’s leading speech synthesis contest. It’s also won various machine translation championships, including the IWSLT 2014 and NIST 2015. Over the past six years, iFlytek’s voice recognition accuracy has improved from 60.2 percent to over 98 percent. The company’s strengths in voice tech became a natural bridge into the world of AI and its industrial application.

iFlytek is also researching the dynamic of AI and neurology. Through computing based on the human brain, iFlytek is trying to unlock the mystery of our intelligence. If they succeed, it may pave the way towards Artificial General Intelligence, meaning human levels of intelligence, one of AI’s holy grails.

Translation on the fly

iFlytek started applying AI to the real world in the shape of natural language processing (NLP) back in 2010, when it developed China’s first voice input product and the second of its kind in the world, after Google. iFlytek’s system has an accuracy of more than 98 percent and supports 22 different Chinese dialects.

In 2016, iFlytek released its first smart device, the iFlytek Translator, which it followed up in April 2018 with the 2.0 incarnation. Offering real-time interpretation between Mandarin and 33 other languages and Chinese dialects, it also translates text in photographs and can be used on 4G or Wi-Fi networks or offline. Most of its users – 86 percent – use it on vacation. Translator 2.0 has also mastered the accents of four major dialects in China’s complex and voluminous linguistic web: Cantonese, Sichuanese, Northeastern Mandarin, and Henan dialect, with support for more expected in the future. In an advance for NLP, the product can recognize different situations and adapt to its users’ language tics.

“There are some who say that there’s no need to build a translator device because the translation function can be integrated into a smartphone. But we made a deliberate decision to sell our translator as a hardware device,” says Hu. First, he explains, we tend to hold our phones close to our faces, which might not always be possible depending on the scenario. Second, phones are affected by ambient noise. Third, Hu believes that intelligent hardware must be easy to use. The best experience is something that works with a single click, but using an app on a smartphone isn’t always easy or intuitive. Fourth, the translation process should allow for natural and intuitive interaction, and sticking your smartphone in someone’s face isn’t always socially acceptable.

In 2012, iFlytek launched its voice cloud platform as part of its efforts to build an ecosystem for the AI industry. Since then, more than 860,000 developers have worked on the platform, which connects 1.9 billion devices and provides nearly 4.6 billion interactive services each day. 

In 2015, iFlytek launched the human-machine interaction interface AIUI, hitting a milestone in the AI industry. AIUI redefined the standards for human-machine interaction in the connected era. Hu adds, “In 2017, iFlytek was announced as one of China’s first open innovation platforms for next-generation AI and our platform will focus on intelligent voice technology. The government clearly recognizes the importance of the ecosystem built on our company’s AI.”

AI: An industry enabler

iFlytek is also applying intelligent voice and AI technology to different sectors, including the judiciary and education.

In the justice system, iFlytek is working with China’s Supreme People’s Court and Supreme People’s Procuratorate (public prosecutors). In 2016, a test in Anhui Province showed that an AI system could identify phone scams with a very high level of accuracy. Moreover, a pilot study found that trials were 30 percent shorter when intelligent voice recognition was used instead of a human reporter.

In education, AI has outperformed all expectations in scoring test papers. In a test in Jiangsu Province, two different AIs scored a series of college entrance test papers. For Chinese essay questions, the two AIs differed by an average of less than seven points per paper. They were 92.82 percent consistent – more than 5 percent higher than the average consistency of two human teachers. A trial in Hunan showed similar scores. 

iFlytek is currently working with China’s National Education Examinations Authority to build an AI lab to jointly develop more advanced technologies for education.

A partnership covering multiple markets 

iFlytek and Huawei have formed a strategic partnership to develop practical applications for voice and AI technology in the areas of telecoms and smart devices, building on nearly a decade of collaboration. In 2010, the two companies deployed the world’s first open cloud platform for Chinese voice recognition. 

In May 2018, Huawei and iFlytek signed a strategic agreement covering four areas: public cloud services, ICT infrastructure, smart devices, and office IT systems. Huawei also integrated iFlytek’s AI technology into its smartphones to gain an edge over its competitors. Huawei and iFlytek are working on smart devices and device cloud services based on iFlytek’s voice AI technologies and capabilities, including voice recognition, speech synthesis, iFlyrec, and iFlytek translation.

In the enterprise space, Huawei uses iFlytek’s technology and products in its infrastructure and its own office applications. The iFlytek speech engine will form a key component of Huawei’s Enterprise Intelligence cloud platform. Hu believes that in the intelligence era, all AI applications will run on the cloud. As cloud computing consumes a lot of resources, device computing and edge computing will better support AI. 

Each with its own strengths and ecosystems, we’re certain that Huawei and iFlytek will help build a strong AI ecosystem and make AI a valuable asset to life, business, and society. 

Australia's reputation as a rule based safe haven for investment further tainted by judiciary attacking media: Judges' association reaction to media reporting on the Pell decision reminiscent of Malaysia's Eusoffe Chin era

by Ganesh Sahathevan


Tweeted by Justice Kelly, President of the Judicial Conference Australia, which is in effect the judges' trade union:

See new Tweets

Tweet

Judicial Conference

@JudicialConfAus

·

Apr 15

JCA President Kelly J criticises recent commentary over the Pell case in

@australian

article

Media bays for blood of judges in Pell case

There has been a flood of emotion and a tsunami of articles following the High Court decision in the Pell case.

Justice Kelly seems to have forgotten if not is unaware that others  also thought the judges of Victoria's Court Of Appeal in Pell's case were at best,incompetent. Here as some examples:

Keith Windschuttle, historian:

... "Those of us who still believe the traditional notion of the law’s majesty remains an essential social pillar that helps preserve us from barbarism can only hope that the B-grade spectacle we have witnessed at so many places in the persecution of George Pell is an aberration and not a portent of some squalid, unwatchable future."

Geoffrey Luck, journalist:
Of all the court transcripts I have read, nothing prepared me for the shoddy, facile, simplistic argumentation of the judgement of the two majority judges – Chief Justice Anne Ferguson and President Chris Maxwell. 

And then there is the article titled Where the Pell Judgment Went Fatally Wrong by John Finnis AC QC  professor emeritus at Oxford University, having been Professor of Law and Legal Philosophy from 1989 to 2010.  He is a Fellow of the British Academy (Law and Philosophy sections). A barrister of Gray’s Inn, he practised from 1979 to 1995 and was appointed Queen’s Counsel [QC] (honoris causa) in 2017.  Originally from South Australia, he was created a Companion in the Order of Australia in 2019 ‘for eminent service to the law, and to education, to legal theory and philosophical enquiry, and as a leading jurist, academic and author’.

TO BE READ WITH

Wednesday, April 15, 2020




More Eusoffe Chin era behaviour from Australia's judges: Judges' association president accuses media of "baying for the blood" of Vic Court Of Appeal judges in Pell case

Saturday, April 11, 2020

Australia's reputation as a rule based safe haven for investment tainted by errant judges: Pell decision reveals a judicial system where the influential can rely on court processes to achieve desired outcomes