Monthly Archives: May 2007

Information – coming to a workplace near you

Posted on by
Reply

hotemployers.gif

In various columns and articles (pdf) Ive pointed out the irony of the fact that, at a time when were deregulating the labour market, were paying next to no attention to the problem of getting information to prospective employees about the quality of workplaces. Though workplaces try hard to keep their employees happy both because it generally improves their productivity and because unhappy workers walk, the fact is that a lot of employees prefer the devil they know to the devil they dont. It would, as I argued in an op ed a few years ago be great if we had a decent, transparent market in job satisfaction. And it wouldnt be that hard to achieve. Because I dont think its up on Troppo, I am posting the old op ed on improving the market for work satisfaction over the fold.

But the purpose of this post is to tell you that someones giving it a try – right here in my home town of Melboure. As I discovered reading The Ages IT supplement yesterday – lured by a headline reading HR gets the Web 2.0 touch – Hot Employers is now offering companies that pay it a fee to subscribe a service whereby their employees can be surveyed on line. The sponsoring firms receive a report on the results as they would from any HR firm, though the automation of the process presumably lowers costs considerably.

But Hot Employers also allows subscribers to publish the results of the survey. As you can imagine, if a firm did well on the survey, publicity for that fact could offer a powerful way of promoting itself to prospective employees. Thus you click on a button Find a good employer and can search for employers with Gold, Silver and Bronze medals in your area, or your industry.

Of course its a long way from having a good idea – thinking they oughta do this to actually bringing it off. A visit to the site confirms that its very new and so a search doesnt turn up many companies. I would have felt more reassured if the site looked like it was backed with more money, as thats important to making a mark and so developing a critical mass. The net is littered with good ideas that failed to achieve critical mass.

But I really wish the guys at Hot Employers the best with their business. The op ed is over the fold. Continue reading →

Passport Policy for Permanent Residents

Posted on by
3

I was in Washington DC yesterday renewing my passport. The US is still imperial, so to comply with Australian metric standards I had to order A4 paper and the photos took two goes before they were within the bounds of the ‘biometric’ software reader. But the passport is just a piece of identification to get between the political boundaries that exist on this planet. The passport isn’t for my benefit, it is for the government’s, such that flows of travellers can be tracked. So why not make it easier on permanent residents and give them an Australian passport.

Permanent residents have an Australian address and have gone through all the security stuff that immigration requires – so give them the option of having an Australian passport along with a permanent resident visa. There are probably many cases where it would expedite an individual getting through a political border. I expect that many permanent residents from disadvantaged nations would prefer to use an Australian Passport, just as an American permanent resident might prefer to use an Australian Passport in the Middle East.

Until Australia manages to do border deals like the member states of the European Union have with each other, then giving Australian Passports to permanent residents may make it easier for individuals to move between the customs and travel regulatory regimes of nation-states.

Spreadsheets in teaching maths – where are they?

Posted on by
11

software-for-numeracy.gifAbout fifteen, perhaps twenty years ago I was talking to a good friend who is an academic in maths education. He was saying that Casio was interested in getting input into the educational potential of their graphical calculators.

I thought there was a real opportunity here. One could build the case for much more graphical teaching of mathematics using the analogy of the power of the graphical user interface. One could rework substantial parts of the curriculum and it would help sell graphical calculators. Probably wouldnt make anyone but the calculator suppliers rich if it made them rich but in the world where academics worry where their next research grant is coming from it seemed like it might be the thing. A slick and technology savvy way to dress up some research into maths education which might get one money from both education departments and corporates with hardware and software to sell. And pioneer something both inevitable and worthwhile at the same time.

My friend wasnt really interested in that kind of research and I didnt think much more about it. But I did think by the time my kids were at school that the time for this kind of research would already be well behind us that the whole of maths education, and education more generally, would have been transformed.

It took only five odd years from the time they became small, cheap and plentiful for calculators to be seen as legitimate aids in maths. It took perhaps another five years for them to have pretty much relegated slide rules and log tables to the dustbin (though not obviously the teaching of the mathematics of logs).

So by the time I took my kids to school I figured that there must have been a quiet revolution in which spreadsheets must have invaded what? a third, two thirds of the maths curriculum. Data bases might have invaded some of it too. Continue reading →

The role of collateral in global environmental action.

Posted on by
8

Lets think constructively about the environment and lets try to think 10 years ahead in global environmental debates. There are many global environmental problems, and these are likely to get worse. The best known one is of course global warming likely due to greenhouse gas emissions, but there are other, I would say more important, problems. The UN Millenium report from 2005 lists them nicely (the Millenium Goals are conspicuous by how much we clapped for them when agreeing to them and how stealthfully the world has ignored them since). There is soil erosion, natural habitat destruction, and the plundering of shared environmental resources, in particular the oceans. If you believe even a trace of the Footprint literature, then our eco(n)systems cannot support the current weight of people at current levels of consumption.
Continue reading →

Office 2007 – The shootout

Posted on by
5

ms-office-2007.gifWell I just cant stop gnawing at the bone. I saw an interesting post on Joshua Gans site on feature creep (Bottom line we want more features when we buy products and fewer when we get them home). Anyway in responding to it in the comments thread I challenged Joshua to a shootout on Office 2007. Since I liked Office 2007 when I first loaded it up and thought Id figure out the things I couldnt work over time, and yet grew to dislike Office 2007 more over time (I’m thinking particularly of Word and outlook) I thought maybe Joshua would too. But he still likes Office 2007 so I challenged him to a shootout.

We wont of course take it very seriously but I thought some light might come out of an exchange of views, so here goes. Joshua’s response follows mine – all over the fold. Continue reading →

May the farce be with you . . . edition # 274

Posted on by
4

I spoke with my accountant today and asked her if my company could lend me money – it’s got more money than it needs and I’ve got less than I want. Actually having written that I realise it’s not accurate. The point of borrowing money from my company is that I’m borrowing lots of money in my own name from a bank – and I don’t much fancy receiving 2% less on my borrowings than my company gets in interest from the bank. The Tax Office, quite rightly, tightened up on private companies lending money to their shareholders because an interest free loan from your company is a pretty easy way to avoid ever having to pay your personal rate of tax if it’s higher than the company rate. So they required that a ‘commerical’ rate of interst be charged.

So far so good. So I wanted the company to lend money to me on which I’d pay a commercial rate of interest (lets leave to one side that the rate should actually be commercial – ie the rate I can get – around 7.2% rather than the ‘standard variable rate’ which no-one pays and which is over 8%).

The tax office have ‘tightened up’ on this further. Now if they banned loans of this kind, I’m not sure it woudl make sense in principle, but I’m sure there’d be some sense in it – since no doubt this maneuvre offers various ways of avoiding tax that I don’t know about. But that would be too simple (and probably politically difficult).

So it’s the old death by a thousand wrist slappings. You have to have a written loan agreement. You can write one yourself but you’re better advised to buy one from a lawyer’s word processor at around $400 to fit the relevant sections of the Tax Act. And you can’t give yourself a rolling ‘line of credit’ on which you pay interest as it falls due – if necessary capitalising the interest by increasing the size of the loan. It has to be for a definite term. In fact the term has to be seven years if it’s unsecured and twenty years if it’s secured. This is the first level of farce because I can presumably write a second mortgage on our property (well buy one for another $400) and voila it’s secured. Still, the whole thing is a farce. Not much chance of being foreclosed on there!

But then what if I want to borrow from the company again to meet the repayments (which is the financial equivalent of just having a line of credit that you can capitalise interest on). No problem. I just write photocopy another loan agreement and off I go again. I can do this for as long as I’ve got paper and toner in my photocopier.

Today the BCA welcomed a new Bill with the short (propaganda) title of the “Simpler Regulatory System Bill”. I’ll have a closer look at it but at a quick inspection it doesn’t look reassuring. It contains a bunch of things that should not require legislation to fix. Indeed the fact that it does require legislation to fix them shows not that they’re being fixed but that they’re still broken! It’s like getting approval from head office to re-fix a nut on the wheel of a car as it runs down the assembly line.

Unfortunately it’s difficult to easily work out the detail of the changes even when consulting the relevant part of the ministerial website. But it’s quite clear that many of the changes, including those liseted below the fold, not only shouldn’t be made by parliaments but should have been made as a matter of routine years ago. Continue reading →

Missing Link – Thursday 24 May

Posted on by
9

Well, things have been a bit lively on the technology side, so no internal hyperlinks (and no wiki, alas). Nonetheless your faithful Missing Link Editorial team ™ have done their bit to bring you lots of bloggyguido.gif goodness to enjoy.

Kicking off today’s issue is a variety of differing views on Amnesty International’s recent entry into Australian political discource. Tim Dunlop and Jason Soon – in a nice bit of bipartisan agreement – both thought Amnesty shot themsleves in the foot rather badly, while Gandhi (as his wont) accuses Tim of crossing over to the Dark Side (presumably Mr Soon was there already). Pommygranate takes a more long-term view, considering the likely damage to Amnesty’s reputation.

Likewise, Catherine Deveny’s rant against government funding for private schools also showed that – for all that people across the political spectrum are supposedly moving closer together – sometimes the centre does not hold. Harry Clarke got very irritated with her, Darlene Taylor thought her piece was terrific, while Andrew Norton – in his usual polite way – simply took her to bits.

Graphics for this edition courtesy Gianna of She Sells Sanctuary and Guido of Rank and Vile. I do wonder where the latter got his model turd… out of an Ekka Sample Bag perhaps? (Queenslander in-joke).

Today’s Missing Link brought to you by Amanda Rose, Jason Soon and James Farrell, with Helen Dale doing the editing thang… (I suspect Ken Parish may have made a few selections, too, but in the absence of the wiki, I can’t be sure). Helen Dale is also responsible for any and all snarky comments (editorial and otherwise). I came as close as I’m ever likely to come to doing something nasty to a fellow counsel’s wig today. Long story.

Continue reading →

What to do with all that hot air?

Posted on by
19

Im feeling cranky today, so readers beware.

A must-read article for all those interested in global warming and CO2 emissions is the recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by our very own Michael Raupach from CSIRO and co-authors, to be found here.

Let me give you some highlights: from emitting 6 billion tonnes in 1990 the world has gone to 8 billion tonnes in 2004. Emissions are now accelerating at 3% a year since 2000, after growing about 1% a year in the preceding 10 years. Those preceding 10 years coincidentally made up the period that world GDP growth was low and for some energy-intensive regions (like the former Soviet Union), even negative. Another highlight is that about half the increase after 2000 is due to the Chinese economic explosion. Perhaps the most telling finding is that energy intensity (energy per PPP dollar) has not declined in any region anymore after 2000.
Continue reading →