If you loved The Wisdom of Crowds , easily the best economic bestseller I've read since The Theory of Moral Sentiments and that was published in 1759, you'll lerve this post by Michael Nielsen. Michael himself is quite an achiever. A graduate of the Uni of Queensland, he's not...
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George Osborne gave a surprising speech earlier this month. The Shadow Chancellor spoke about the egalitarian philosopher John Rawls and called for greater equality of opportunity. He praised Swedish educational reforms and argued that parents should be able to choose a school...
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Labor-leaning Sunday Territorian columnist Scott Stirling wrote last week about the challenges facing the CLP Opposition. However, they pale by comparison with the situation faced by the Henderson government. Some are purely political problems in the wake of Labors recent clos...
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From a Fin Review column on 22nd July. The February meeting of the Shellharbour council, on the NSW south coast, was to start at 7.15pm. But the majority of councillors, Labor Party members, refused to assemble until an undesirable left the public gallery. He seemed harmless,...
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Congratulations to Mathew Mitcham - I think I'm right in saying the only out gay guy in the Olympics. Congratulations for his coming through depression, and burnout and coming back and doing so well. Mathew was stoked to be getting silver. Then the guy coming first dived not s...
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"The rich beauty of Dr. James Orbinskis writing contrasts with the stark poverty and suffering of the people he has served. . . . This book exposes truths most of us would rather not know. Do not put it down. . . . See who you become after reading it. Canadian Medical Associat...
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Thanks to Ken Parish for helpful comments and corrections. The high price of justice Nazi Sex Romp! Now Ive got your attention Im going to talk about legal procedure. After the lecture well return to the sex romp. Attorney General Robert McClelland has joined the chorus of con...
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The short answer is that we'd better be able to because as various people of high authority have commented, the current system is unsustainable. Here's story as to why. A costs decision handed down in the NSW Supreme Court in February showed National Australia Bank spent $75 m...
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The recent resignation of former Labor MLA John Bailey and two other members from the Darwin Harbour Advisory Committee raises some important issues. The previous CLP government always had a gung ho attitude towards Darwin development, along with a seeming disregard for indepe...
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I am calling on all Troppodillians to nominate a worse research paper than this . From a very quick squiz the people who wrote the paper are against rape. After an introductory poem the paper begins thus: Women who are raped or who suffer domestic violence are somehow thought...
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It was an innocent age where the major threats to freedom were mustachioed men with hydrogen bombs and the monopolistic tendencies of big business. In the paradoxical world of Clive Hamilton , the free market liberals of the 1950s never realised that the most serious threat to...
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Last weekend I went to see Guys and Dolls. I had no idea it was such a good show. I remember it was on when I was a kid, so I figured it might have been written in the late fifties or early sixties - definitely pre-Beatles or Buddy Holly even if it chronologically coincided wi...
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There have been a bunch of things I've wanted to post about, but have simply not had the time. I still don't have the time, but I with a bit of enthusiasm and not much time, I thought I'd mention some good things. The first is that I listened to this podcast of Dan Pink talkin...
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When Margaret Thatcher said that there was no such thing as society , her enemies were delighted . Here, in a single phrase, was her heartless philosophy of individualism -- a philosophy which abandoned vulnerable people to the competitive violence of the marketplace and celeb...
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I just clicked on Amazon's 'add to my shopping cart' and got told that four books had changed price. Usually they have gone up. Or that's been my experience. But things are a-changing as you can see from the excerpt below. Is this deflation, increasing copying, competition fro...
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From Glen Dyer in today's Crikey. I agree. If you -- or ASIC or the ASX -- are looking for another example of well-informed trading affecting stock prices ahead of stockmarket announcements, look at yesterday's 5.3% drop in the price of construction giant, Leighton Holdings to...
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This started out as a comment on Don's recent post on Hamilton (for which I second or third -- the praise). Totting up the word count when I finally lifted my head, I realised it was an absurdly long piece to tack onto a comments thread. In any case, the points I wanted to tak...
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Here is today's column for the Financial Review. Patently there's a problem As Mark Twain said, It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. Its what you know for sure that just aint so. Our biggest mistakes often come when we're most untroubled by our logic even w...
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Brian Fitzgerald drew my attention to this sad valedictory post at The Patry Copyright Blog . 2. The Current State of Copyright Law is too depressing This leads me to my final reason for closing the blog which is independent of the first reason: my fear that the blog was becom...
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Is the New York Philharmonic just a cover band? After all, rather than writing and performing their own material, aren't they just rehashing old tunes by Mozart, Stravinsky and Beethoven ? One of the conceits of underground music scenes, is that the performers are genuine crea...
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Matthew Bonson and the long-tongued Len Kiely in happier times on elevation to the Ministry in November last year The day before Saturdays unexpectedly knife-edge NT election, Chief Minister Paul Henderson gave a politically prudent and factually correct assessment of Labors c...
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Nothing seems to excite conservatives as much as the spectre of moral relativism. For conservatives, relativism is one of the great errors of the postmodernist left. If it is allowed to spread through the classrooms, lecture theatres and legal system, Western civilization will...
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When the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer threw his neighbour down a flight of stairs he said it was because she was making too much noise. He couldn't stand noise and once wrote that "when a great mind is interrupted, disturbed and distracted it is capable of no more than a co...
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I found this brief excerpt (courtesy 3 Quarks Daily ) hard to resist: If you want to go where people are reading Hannah Arendt and Karl Popper, Nafisi has admonished, go to Iran. Go to Iran, I would add, if you want to discover where people are reading Jürgen Habermas, Isaiah...
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Here's a nice looking painting what I got sent in my email - having once subscribed to the email list of the Rex Irwin Gallery which is holding an exhition of this guy from the 12th August. I'll be in the wrong city, but they look like nice paintings. Check out details here .
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George Kahn, 1948-2008 In late 1987, a group of 30 Australians traveled to Nicaragua to pick coffee in solidarity with the Sandinista revolution. On Christmas Day, as we waited at the airport in Mexico for our flight to Managua, we were joined by a tall, easy-going, laconic, 3...
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I went to a fascinating talk by Gregory Clark last night at the Melbourne Business School. As I often do - and as I often do wrongly - I had taken his book to be one of those best seller books which announce a few new interesting ideas that have been explored in an article of...
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This article by Stephen Bartos first appeared in the Public Sector Informant magazine, published with the Canberra Times today. This version has been slightly edited, primarily to include links. Government Information It was two steps forward, one back for access to government...
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This semester I'm teaching an elective unit in Cyberspace Law at CDU. Research and preparation for it has been another of the reasons for the delayed reappearance of Missing Link. However, it's also involved a certain amount of fun. In the first online tutorial last week, we h...
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Having already explained to Troppodillians some of the terminal shortcomings in Optus's wireless broadband service to me, I'm afraid things have not improved. Several rogue charges turned up on the statement that coincided with my taking out the wireless broadband account to t...
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One of the numerous tasks that's been distracting me from resuming Missing Link over the last couple of weeks is doing promotion/marketing for Jen's Missing Link Theatre production of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story , playing next week in Darwin (I stole the name of the blog revi...
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New from the NBER : One of the advantages of going to a good college in the US - over the fold. "Among managers with the strongest connection to senior officials (same school at the same time with the same degree), the connected holdings earned an average annual 16.05 percent...
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A nice morning with the Age yielded two good op eds which I link to here in case you're interested. I'm thrilled the cruel and unusual way we had of welcoming boat people has been ended by the new Minister for Immigration who, though I've not been watching closely, seems to sa...
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