A while ago, I was rung by Richard Letts of the Music Council of Australia , a kind of peak body of music organisations asking - to my amazement - if I would give the Annual address at their annual conference. Robyn Homes of the National Library of Australia had seen me speak...
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Contemplating recent nominations for the Prestigious Critical Rationalist Scholar award. Terence Kealey , Barry Smith , the late Sir Donald Bradman and Ronald Dale Barassi . The criteria for the PCR Scholar are identical to the four that are used for the Rhodes Scholarship, co...
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This is a guest post from Julia Thornton an occasional commenter on Troppo. Nicholas Gruen’s Government 2.0 taskforce left us a treasure trove of a report, but when the nerds, hackers and policy wonks had gone home, in amongst the half eaten pizza and empty Coke bottles there...
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After a year of reading about relative salaries in different sports, salary cap breaches, player unrest and defections in the NSW press, I only just learned that the salary cap in the AFL is $7950000 compared to the NRL's $4100000. This set a little bell off in my head. This m...
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I was a bit disappointed when we were in front and looked like winning by a point - at around the 25 minute mark? Why? Because my son was overseas on a school trip and he would have loved to have been at the Grand Final. So I was hoping St Kilda would have a Barry Breen to kic...
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Well whether they win or not the 'Colliwobbles' come from another time, long, long ago in the late sixties and early seventies when the Collies used to finish first and then not win, either through some bad luck (64, 66, 70) or through peaking a bit early or going into the fin...
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When I hear that anything is 'committed' to something I reach for my gun. It's an almost certain signifier of insincerity. As a donor I receive bumph from the Brotherhood of St Laurence. The latest newsletter I got told me that "The Brotherhood is committed to ensuring that ev...
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Extracting some arguments from the critique of Marxism in the second volume of The Open Society and its Enemies . This is concerned with the Marx/Engels doctrine on the possible need for a violent revolution. Popper argued that the ambiguities of violence and of power-conquest...
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Yesterday in the post I received a copy of CAB: Collaborative Auto Biography , a series of short anecdotes and stories from residents of Cabramatta rendered as comics by Matt Huynh - a project intended in a large part to show stories about the area that don't involve heroin. I...
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Strange things happen when you check the links on your site. Proceeding from a nice statement of classical liberal principles to the Mont Pelerin Society we find The Winners of the 2010 Hayek Essay Contest . And the winner is...Toby Evans of Australia. Whoever he is, you can p...
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Who is this man? And why should you care? He is a Portuguese physicist, Filipe Maia, a PhD student at Janos Hajdu Molecular Biophysics group at Uppsala University and he's designed the best chess rating system the world has ever seen. Who knew he had it in him? Maybe him. Almo...
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This is a belated report on a debate on Islam versus Atheism at my campus. It was part of Islamic Awareness Week , orgainsed by the Muslim Students' Association. The official question for debate was 'Should God have a place in the 21st Century?', and the format was pretty stan...
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I was unaware of "doors duty" as recently outlined by Annabel Crabb , but, I can't say I'm surprised. Anyway here's her explanation of what it is. I remember having a conversation last year with a Labor backbencher who had been on "doors duty" during a sitting week. You know t...
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By: Li King King (Strategic Interaction Group, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena) This paper investigates whether language priming activates different cultural identities and norms associated with the language communicated; bilingual subjects are given Chinese instructio...
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I comments on my previous post on Metrobuses and small improvements in public transport BruceT gave a complaint about waiting and then giving up because of the uncertainty about when one would actually arrive on a weekend when the frequency was lower. This reminded me of the w...
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http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html
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Enough of critique already. During the election I started a campaign to try to mix a little activism into the numerous well founded critiques of the truly crapulous quality of our media. I figured in this day and age it might be possible to ignite something via some consciousn...
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Or two. Well folks, here's my report from the Preliminary Final hot from comments on my last post; Dr Peach will commentate for food, or at least for tickets to the Grand Final. It was a crushing win. The Pies took the game to a new place as they say. On the other hand one cou...
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Well that's the question for us long suffering Collingwood supporters. Who will we maul, and will it be ourselves. For the uninitiated Collingwood finished at the top of the ladder at the end of home and away matches for the first time since . . . well I've read it somewhere,...
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Judging by this afternoon's headlines , PM Gillard may be taking seriously Independent Rob Oakeshott's bid to be appointed Speaker of the House of Representatives. I tend to agree with Dolly Downer's observation that Oakeshott just doesn't have the maturity or parliamentary ex...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqrr6Aiaqlk&feature=youtu.be Here's my presentation at the O'Reilly Government 2.0 Summit last week. And a copy edited transcript is below the fold. Good afternoon everyone! I’m going to talk to you about public goods. Informally we all have the...
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Alex Stewart has had his 15 minutes of fame, but may live to regret it. Earlier this week he posted a video on Youtube. It showed him smoking lawn-clipping cigarettes that were fashioned out of pages torn from the Bible and the Koran. He compared the taste “scientifically” and...
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When we discuss public transport and public transport planning in the public arena we tend to either fall into whinging or into desires (or yearning) for big sexy projects. This is extremely so in Sydney. The NSW malaise has allowed it to be conventional wisdom that the public...
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Urban legend has it that the hemline is correlated with the economy. In times of decline, the hemline moves towards the floor (decreases), and when the economy is booming, skirts get shorter and the hemline increases. We collected monthly data on the hemline, for 1921-2009, an...
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Readers will know that I'm not a big fan of Tiger Airlines . Still, sometimes they offer the best time of travel or such large savings that you are tempted. And tempted I've been to travel back from Canberra to Melbourne tomorrow night. Having reflected on how stupid it if of...
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It won't get published because it's too long, but worth saying just the same: Dear Sir, Peter Murphy's always entertaining pro-CLP spin doctoring column sometimes obscures issues that really warrant more serious reflection. This week's column (12 September) blaming Warren Snow...
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A late call on the passing of Sol Encel, a tireless writer and public intellectual, acknowledged as the father of Australian sociology. He died suddenly and peacefully at home, aged 84, still engaged in a range of writing and research projects. He came from Poland at the age o...
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Saturday 11 to Wed 15, 10 am to 5 in the Great Hall . My treasures: all in practically "as new" condition. Peter Medawar, Pluto's Republic (not a missprint). $3. Review . The editor of the Age Monthly Review would not let me write that the cover photo depicted Medwar demonstra...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMxz7rzwee8 Paddy McGuinness once opined about the chasm between consultant and academic speak in the realm of economics. I think it was in the context of the battle between the mush served up by the consultants which became BCG in Australia in t...
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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="220" caption="Macroeconomic swimming"] [/caption] A thought bubble from when I was in the pool. It retreads some basic ground for clarity's sake. [fn1]. Consider a typical cyclical recession driven by uncertain expectations by agents. D...
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According to the logic of my last post on the political situation, when Andrew Wilkie declared his intention to support Labor, the other three independents should have followed suit after a dignified interval. I think the analysis was mostly right, except that, as Ken predicte...
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Nicholas Nassim Taleb of Black Swans fame calls it the narrative fallacy. In narrating the way something happens, one convinces oneself that it was inevitable, that it happened for good reasons. A nice illustration of it is the way in which Tom Peters' In search of excellence...
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Having encouraged Sustainability Victoria to blog, I discovered reading for a board meeting that they'd been doing just that for a few months. They didn't get precious and needlessly delay action by insisting on having it within their own domain. They just went to Wordpress an...
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This is something I was thinking of doing for a while, but since Possum has started a "What if?" over at his joint , this is as good a time as any to launch Australian Alternate History Week and hope it is taken up across a few more blogs. In short, I want participants to crea...
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Well it kept me in suspense until the last few pages. The speech is well worth reading and is here (pdf).
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The world's most inscrutable man? I'm probably completely wrong about this, so please help me improve on the analysis. 1. Windsor, Oakeshott and Katter do not want another election. They mean to enjoy the leverage the election outcome has given them. 2. They have consistently...
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