[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="464"] Not the ABC's logo, but a very nice looking image whatever it is![/caption] I think this is the first post on Troppo that's 'hoisted from archives' which is to say it's an earlier post that I'm reposting. It was done as preparation...
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Last year I asked what broader social purpose is served by schools competing for position on NAPLAN league tables . I emphasised both the meaninglessnesss of the information (reiterated recently by David Hardie in Crikey ) and the lack of any aggregate benefit from inducing fa...
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People who've read this blog for a few years may be familiar with my take on the regulation of mortgage brokers. I'm in favour of simple regulation which puts front and centre the fact that brokers should be thought of in the same way as fridge salespeople in a department stor...
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From Mark Thoma's blog: David Frum and the Closing of the Conservative Mind, by Bruce Bartlett : As some readers of this blog may know, I was fired by a right wing think tank Called the National Center for Policy Analysis in 2005 for writing a book critical of George W. Bush's...
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One of the things I like about Journey to the West (one of the four great Chinese classics, but better known here as the basis for Monkey Magic) is the way it delves into almost every conceivable corner of Chinese cosmology. Characters venture to the courts of dragon kings, to...
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This column makes me think of the craziness of the South - which while building a slave based economy also built a terrorist society in which people got bumped off for having the wrong political views, a society that was crazy in its refusal to compromise - all the North was s...
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(Originally published in the business pages of the Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald, 24th March 2010) When I first began writing about the global economy, more than twenty-five years ago, what would be considered a reasonably comprehensive coverage for an Australian aud...
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One of the great benefits of Web 2.0 is the way in which it facilitates collaboration and information exchange in all manner of ways. And one of the upshots of this is that it improves the market for reputation. It does so by speeding up the process itself - so people who have...
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I've been a fan of Warren Buffett for some time . I've been reading a big fat bio of him - The Snowball by Alice Schroeder. It's well written but the content is a bit too pedestrian to really make me think it's worth reading over 800 pages. Anyway, I've just finished the best...
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So Obama got his modest and compromised health care bill through Congress. For those who are more interested in policy than process, there's a pretty helpful summary of the legislation here . However, I hold the desirabilty of the reforms to be self-evident. The only serious i...
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I'm a bit conflicted about Rudd's health plan. On the one hand, it's fairly clear that the States engage in a degree of cost-shifting and even cynical pork-barrelling over health. I'm sure it isn't a coincidence that the two NSW hospitals most often in the news for their decre...
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Fear Strikes Out, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times The day before Sunday’s health care vote, President Obama gave an unscripted talk to House Democrats. Near the end, he spoke about why his party should pass reform: “Every once in a while a moment comes where you have a c...
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We do have a few advantages, perhaps the greatest being that we don’t have a strategic plan Warren Buffett Obliquity . . . or indirectness of means is a subject to which it turns out I've given a lot of thought over the years going back at least to Charles Lindblom's attacks f...
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They don't get much better than this. HT Three Quarks Well for the umpteeth time, WordPress has spat out the 'embedding' code I put into it. But this link is fabulous. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFabjc6mFk4&feature=player_embedded PS - I find on reviewing the site that it...
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White to play Carlsen vs J Smeets 33. ? See game for solution. From the Amberchess blindfold comp. I couldn't work it out - and I could see! And a nice little immortal game by Kasparov here .
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"Lilies that fester, smell far worse than weeds". Miranda Devine opens yesterday's column with a quote from Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 . Apparently National Party leader Warren Truss has been quoting Shakespeare to make a point about the Prime Minister's declining popularity. A s...
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3. Home Computer Use and the Development of Human Capital by Ofer Malamud, Cristian Pop-Eleches - #15814 (ED HE CH) This paper uses a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of home computers on child and adolescent outcomes. We collected survey data from househ...
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SPIEGEL: Mr Carlsen, what is your IQ? Magnus Carlsen: I have no idea. I wouldn’t want to know it anyway. It might turn out to be a nasty surprise. If you enjoy a bit of chess, Amberchess could be your kind of tourney. All games are over in about an hour and each day two games...
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"Hug a hoodie" -- For years Conservative leader David Cameron has struggled to live down the catchphrase. In 2006 he made a speech about crime and young people in "hoodies" . While bad behaviour must be punished, he insisted, we also need to show a lot more love and understand...
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Justin Madden - boofhead, retired AFL hero, Labor Minister and perhaps soon to be unwitting definer of the bounds of Westminster democracy A dispute has arisen in Victoria's Upper House of Parliament which seems to show some promise of throwing legal light on a dim aspect of A...
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Gather round and listen to this tale. One of the promises made by the current government in opposition that they managed to get in place without much difficulty was the Lobbyists Register . This was to make the whole lobbying process more transparent. Any firms wanting to lobb...
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Well, I probably won't be there, but I must say this is coooool. Very cool. An auction of old old radios . They're little bundles of nostalgia these little guys. What about this one! Or perhaps you'd like it in blue. Blue we can do. Joel's, the auctioneer reckons they'll go fo...
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The other day I was at Toby's Estate's Wooloomooloo outlet when I became inordinately interested in the menu pricing. From my notes (I did mean inordinately) : Short Black/Ristretto : $2.20 Long Black/Piccolo Latte : $3.00 Latte/Flat White/Cappuccino : $3.50 Here's my puzzleme...
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Most of the initial reactions to Tony Abbott's maternity leave proposal have focussed on its political motivation , on how it squares with his personal ideology , and on reactions of the business lobby . As far as the politics are concerned, it looks like standard Howard era p...
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On Sunday I wrote: " It’s never been easier to check quotations ". It's time for an update. While checking some of my own words on Monday, I discovered that many of my old blog posts had been attributed to Danger Mouse and Admin . A part of my online identity had been sucked d...
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It's always nice to get a name for something that is rummaging round in one's mind. Autoantonymy has - believe it or not been doing that in my tiny brain for many years. So I'm greatful to the great Three Quarks website for giving me the word (and grateful to Ingolf for tellin...
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It's never been easier to check quotations. With tools like Google Books and the Yale Book of Quotations there's no need to publish spurious or out of context quotes. But even today, books, newspapers and academic papers are full of quotes that are just wrong. Here's an exampl...
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For some time now I've been arguing that we should do for information what we did for competition in the 1990s - adopt a national information policy in the image of national competition policy. National competition policy was a trawl through our economic institutions presuming...
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Lots of readers of this blog will be regular readers of Tyler Cowen. I'm not, but that's just my taste. He often has interesting things to say and there are just too many such people in the blogosphere so he's not on my feedreader. Anyway, Tyler Cowen is often a good read and...
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I participated in an enjoyable discussion on open government on Late Night Live last night . If one has been thinking about things for a long time and wants to get certain ideas across, it can be pretty challenging doing this effectively - which is to say without misunderstand...
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A great column by the great Paul Krugman - who should have got the Nobel Prize for Journalism. So the Bunning blockade is over. For days, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky exploited Senate rules to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits. In the end, he gave in, alt...
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OK - I posted the code, but the video didn't embed. In any event, you can watch and read all about it at much greater length Slate :
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Herewith a column of mine for Government News arguing that with Government 2.0 'open government' is making the transition from being essentially an agenda of constitutional hygiene and civil rights (perhaps regarded as an economic luxury) to being a micro-economic reform issue...
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