We examine how multitasking affects performance and check whether women are indeed better at multitasking. Subjects in our experiment perform two different tasks according to three treatments: one where they perform the tasks sequentially, one where they are forced to multitas...
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Paul Krugman looks again at the relationship between deficit reduction, wages and employment in the USA. h ttp://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/wages-and-employment-yet-again/ Yglesais says that a decline in deficit could lead to further employment expansion if it led to...
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In the conference I attended in Wellington NZ I saw a presentation by Tim McNamara a Wellington developer who spearheaded what seemed like a very successful volunteer web 2.0 effort that arose in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake. Using Ushahidi an open source package in...
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I love newspapers and read lots of them. But I don't love any one newspaper so much that I'd pay hundreds of dollars a year to read it online. The kind of package I could be persuaded to pay for would be a subscription to a bundle of my favourite newspapers and magazines. But...
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As you may know, the Dunera brought a bunch of people out to Australia who settled in very nicely and added to the place. A coach of olympic runners, numerous professors, some rich entrepreneurs. I don't know if Fred Lowen and Ernst Roedeck got rich but they founded FLER and w...
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Retired diplomat Bruce Haigh has a valid point when he refers to Gillard government threats to refuse to issue visas on "character grounds" to Christmas Island asylum seeker rioters as "revengeful". More accurately it's cynical playing to the populist gallery on a par with Ton...
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Peter Whiteford is one of my favourite commenters. He rarely joins a thread without adding useful data or some telling insight. On Monday he showed up on Matt Yglesias' blog to explain the difference between progressivity and redistribution in the tax system. The debate was ov...
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Well it's an overused word right now but have a look at this if you've not seen it before - it's lovely. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kkGeOWYOFoA
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A while back I was asked if I would be the patron of the Australian Digital Alliance . Well . . . you could have knocked me down with a feather! Anyway, the ADA is a fine organisation which describes itself as follows on its website. The ADA is a non-profit coalition of public...
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A couple of months ago I read Interstate 69 , which is an unexpectedly interesting account of the advocates and opponents (neither of whom are really insiders) of an extension to the eponymous road from the American Midwest to the Mexican border and their attempts to gain the...
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Yes folks, the guy I probably very unfairly was rude about here , has done something with his life. He's lent some of his famous empirical skills to showing something we all know in our bones, namely that people are still producing records, even though the bottom has been slid...
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Just so you know, this time of year sees one of the most fun chess competitions on the calendar - that is if you don't think a fun chess competition is a contradiction in terms. The Amber Tournament pits the very top echelon of chessdom against each other with each round invol...
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One of the things I have against academics is that they are supposed to be smart. They are smart. Yet get enough of them together and you get this - from Robin Hanson . Words fail me. Once upon a time some researchers gave people diseases without their consent or knowledge. Ot...
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When the SL-1 nuclear reactor exploded in Idaho releasing a radioactive plume and killing three workers, a local paper reported the accident on page 12 . That was 1961. Today some residents of Idaho are so worried about the nuclear accident 8000 kilometers away that they're bu...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X454D3Fzwso I've spoken about it previously, but I've just found the treasure trove above of Farnarkeling reports from the Gillies Report. The form of comedy is so pure that the final song is a bit of a pity - as good as it is - compared with the...
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The crisis in Japan has dominated the media over the past week. With the earthquake and tsunami over, many bloggers turned their attention the unfolding disaster at the Japanese nuclear power plant Fukushima Daiichi and its implications for the future of nuclear energy. It's n...
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I've just finished a bit of a barnstorm tour of New Zealand giving two presentations with a similar title to that above and a talk on Govt 2.0 which funded the visit. I must say I've loved it. Having checked out Auckland and Wellington for the first time in forty years, I can...
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My first reaction to Coles' recent milk discounting was that this is good news. Milk is not a huge expense for our family; we buy all our milk at the deli. But for those doing it tough, paying $1 a litre for milk (and lower prices for several other staples) could conceivably m...
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The latest situation with damaged Japanese nuclear power plants seems if anything more potentially dire and apocalyptic than what prompted my comment on Don Arthur's post : Seems to me that whatever now happens the nuclear power option is almost certainly a dead duck in all we...
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Of course we are, but in order to convince the outside world that we are has needed someone to collect the data on the grades given to foreign students and analyse it. Gigi Foster of UNSW has done just that in a study looking at the marks of students of different backgrounds i...
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A lot of nonsense is being written by pundits about Julia Gillard's supposedly terminal leadership situation in the light of the carbon tax issue. The reality is that if she manages to broker a deal that gets through Parliament this year, then she'll be seen as a strong leader...
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Happiness is a recurrent topic in the blogosphere, not least at Troppo where several of us have posted abou t it more than once. There's even a strand of economics that focuses on studying happiness. In part that's why it struck me as a bit strange that Australian writer David...
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I liked this brief piece from Peter Drysdale introducing a recent East Asia Forum Weekly Digest and asked if I could reproduce it here and he agreed. 'Be not afraid of greatness,' wrote William Shakespeare in Twelfth Night. 'Some men are born great, some achieve greatness and...
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Saul Eslake asked a bunch of people for comments on the recent Grattan Institute study of productivity and I sent him back a long email which I reproduce with some editing here. Nothing very surprising for people who are regular visitors here, but perhaps worth posting in case...
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I was contemplating writing a post about an ignorant, self-interested op-ed by billionaire mining heiress Gina Reinhardt until I asked myself the question: what's the point? It's a question whose answer increasingly constrains my blogging output after almost 9 years at the gam...
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According to recent media reports an explosion has blown the roof off an unstable reactor north of Tokyo. The reactor is Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station's unit no 1. World Nuclear News reports : Television cameras trained on the plant captured a dramatic explosion surr...
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How did you sleep last night? Thousands of kilometers away in the cities of Japan, people are trapped under rubble crying out for help. According to recent news reports 1000 people may have died in yesterday's earthquake and the tsunami that followed. If 18th century philosoph...
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I haven't had time to put together the usual Missing Link post today. So I'll turn it over to you. If you've read something enlightening, thought provoking, amusing or annoying that you'd like share then go right ahead. The comments thread is open.
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It's a high res picture if you want to download it and read the detail - which is fascinating.
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See over page for Troppo's exclusive revelations. The other day I discovered a new expression: "click-bait". It was used on ABC Media Watch in connection with a concocted story repeatedly published on News Ltd websites about a German bloke allegedly killed and eaten by his own...
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Teacher Incentives and Student Achievement: Evidence from New York City Public Schools by Roland G. Fryer - #16850 (ED LS) Abstract: Financial incentives for teachers to increase student performance is an increasingly popular education policy around the world. This paper descr...
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Thus reads the first of so far 113 comments on the Qld Police's Facebook page in response to a story in the Courier Mail. John Howard took to talk-back radio to give him a direct line through the compulsive world of spin that is the mass media. Now the Qld Police are showing h...
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I learned this somewhat startling fact last week. I was in a group of people - public servants - who clearly thought it was a problem, something to be 'managed' or ameliorated in some way. After all, it's not very balanced is it? Anyway my guess as to why it's happening is the...
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Ayn Rand's 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged is so popular even Angus & Robertson stock it . And now after years of rumours , it's finally become a movie . That's odd because it's longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace and climaxes with a philosophical speech that runs for 70 pages. Most...
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I'm reading Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants which is quite good. It is a 'book of the article' type of book, but I like it nevertheless. Part Two and some of the chapters at the end are the best part of the book. Copying from the top review on Amazon sets out the basic plo...
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God help the Gillard government with someone like Wayne Swan trying to explain the carbon tax : Mr Swan is now distancing Labor from the term "carbon tax" and accused Opposition Leader Tony Abbott of lying about how it will operate. "What we're talking about here is an interim...
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Business is not happy with Barack Obama - and why should they be? After all they were spoiled by having a real pro in the job before Obama got there. Anyway, Obama has been leaning heavily on all arms of government - fiscal policy (obviously), monetary policy (OK, well via the...
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Dunera Boy Erwin Fabian , about whom I've written at least twice before is at it again - which is to say he has another exhibition on. He's in his mid-nineties now and still working away every day in his North Melbourne studio (which is an old tin shed). I went to the opening...
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In this week's Missing Link Friday: bloggers complain about talkback radio; Andrew Bolt shares a bizarre political fantasy; and, tacked on the end, the usual list of other interesting stuff. Angry radio The whole point of talkback radio is to get the audience emotionally engag...
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I gave a talk this morning at the Australian Digital Alliance policy seminar. Somewhat to my surprise I'm the patron of the ADA and so had to sing for my supper. My talk had the title reported above. As an economist among lawyers I was in some trepidation as to how it would al...
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Akismet didn't know if this was spam or not - but it is. The very root of your writing whilst appearing agreeable at first, did not really settle properly with me personally after some time. Someplace within the sentences you actually were able to make me a believer but just f...
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This post is merely two additions to previous posts, neither of which warranted a post on their own. The first relates to this post from September where I talked about the idea of realtime mapping of bus services using GPS data. Better people than I had the same idea and, thro...
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{This is the original version of an article that appeared from Dec to February in two installments in the Canberra Times} Australia has an official policy, pursued by the Ministry of Finance and Deregulation, on the relationship between government and the web that attempts to...
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How could you compare the health systems of the world in terms of outcomes with plausible verisimilitude, in other words by making assumptions that don't just give you junk? I was sceptical when I read of this index, but think it's a pretty good, though like any such exercise...
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From Three Quarks The perils of writing about Ramanujan, as I did in my last 3QD column , is that there will always be those who insist that a better educated Ramanujan would have been a worse mathematician. One response is to say that by the same token a worse educated Euler...
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Three things emerged from qanda last night . The first was that Malcolm Turnbull is out of control, and thinks he can undermine Tony Abbott at will. So there's some fun in store. The other two are closely related. One is that, whatever Bill Shorten learned in his MBA at the Me...
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Like Canadian UQ legal academic James Allan , former NSW Premier Bob Carr is a vehement long-term opponent of a bill or charter of rights for Australia (or any State). A post on Carr's blog only last week confirms that his attitude has not mellowed: More judge-made law a fine...
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