I paid a visit to Catallaxy earlier today after my Google reader informed me that Rafe Champion had awarded me and Jason Soon something called the HL Mencken Award . Although it's evidently not intended ironically, I was a bit taken aback given that my last interaction with Ra...
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The ABC's Australia Talks program ran a show this week about the troubles of the Australian book industry. Its starting point was that the local bookselling and book publishing industry is in a heap of trouble. Not for the first time, the program did a deal of hand-wringing ab...
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White Ribbon Day: "In an afternoon in Montreal on December 6th 1989, a man massacred 14 of his female classmates. From this horrific action, a nation was brought to the forefront of an issue that had been severely underreported for too long." Lip Magazine . "White Ribbon Day p...
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Here's a paragraph I wrote about fifteen years ago. The culture of economic expertise places inadequate weight on integrating insights from multiple perspectives, that it frequently places an unreasonably high 'burden of proof' on heterodox views, and that it has a penchant fo...
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Adelaide's "Festival of Ideas" last month featured a useful discussion of the mining industry's contribution to the economy, since replayed on the ABC program The National Interest . Towards the end there was a brief discussion of how mining damages prime farming land. Asked a...
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The ethics of the second oldest profession - new post by me at CDU Law and Business Online .
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Apparently some US journalism academic named Tanni Haas has written a book called Making it in the Political Blogosphere: The World's Top Political Bloggers Share the Secrets to Success . I'm not interested in the subject per se , because I long ago concluded that the recipe w...
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With the Media Inquiry in full swing and the Greens' Bob Brown complaining loudly about News's lack of fairness and accuracy , now might be a good time to travel back in time 20 years. Let's visit another era when a powerful paper was unashamedly boosting one side of politics...
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New post by me at CDU Law and Business Online .
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Like Paul Krugman part of what originally drew me into Economics was the premise behind Asimov's Foundation books. This premise was a far future where a discipline had managed to formalise and model human society, shed light on what would happen and create preconditions for a...
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I tend to get increasingly grumpy as I get to the fag end of final exam marking. This morning provided a classic example. I received in my email inbox a typically sanctimonious, patronising communication from someone in another School who is in the habit of sending frequent un...
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Troppodillians may recall a post of mine where I explained an avent I attended that was showcasing kids who'd undertaken exciting IT projects. Here's an extract: I got talking to Ben and Cameron. Ben had taught himself to program and been instrumental in building the app and g...
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[Cross-posted to Online Opinion ] I spend my working life running an online media firm - WorkDay Media, publisher of Banking Day - with its owner and editor-in-chief, Ian Rogers. Last month, Ian and I wrote a submission to the federal government’s Independent Media Inquiry. Yo...
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(cross-posted from Core) The Italian political scene has given rise to a phenomenon seen often in developing countries: a care-taker government run by a respected economist with an implicit mandate to ‘get the country out of the mess’. That mess, a public debt of 120% of GDP t...
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In an idle moment I read this article . It's an adversarial interview. Only it's in the lifestyle section and it's of a celebrity - Dolly Parton, who has always seemed like quite a nice sort, though you wouldn't be too surprised to find out that it wasn't so. Anyway, since it'...
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A Troppodillian referred me to this column by Paul Sheehan . It is a very truthy column. Yea verily. Your task, should you decide to accept it, is to point us to another column which is more misguided and ill-informed than it is. As you would know, the Troppo Mercedes Sports h...
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The disclaimer below the fold is used by Virgin in their lounges when you log onto their wi-fi. Yet, like so many disclaimers, although it takes a good while to read, it contains terms almost all of which would be implied in the absence of such a disclaimer. Indeed, if there a...
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"Public debate in Australia has been shaped in a profound way by astroturfing", says advertising strategist Ravi Prasad . "If you look at the debate around the carbon tax, the debate around mining supertax, and the public debate around asylum seekers, the public debates in the...
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http://youtu.be/S7ehlw_phys
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Put it up to eleven: "The entire media is shouting ALL the time because they're worried that if they pull back on their Tube Screamers their highly compressed copy won't be heard over all the other sources of distraction", says Mr Denmore . We reject your demand for demands: T...
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I cam across this post in my morning Google reader perusal: A ballot measure that StateImpact Ohio (a creation of local public media and NPR) describes as “a referendum on a constitutional amendment…aimed at keeping the national health care reform law from taking [e]ffect” won...
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One of the less significant but more entertaining aspects of yesterday's parliamentary antics surrounding passage of the carbon price legislation was Nationals Senator Ron Boswell's sledge of former colleague Tony Windsor: Nationals Senator Ron Boswell branded Mr Windsor "the...
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The latest psychology bestseller The Folly of Fools is on the triumph of deceit. It looks quite interesting. Anyway, it looked a bit too focused on the bestseller formula - which is often the book of the article formula for me to want to read it all. But I've downloaded my Kin...
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I usually disagree with recently reborn RWDB blogger Professor Bunyip, and his potshots at this week's principal witnesses in the Finkelstein Press Inquiry aren't exceptional in that regard. But I have to confess (not for the first time) to taking a certain guilty pleasure at...
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Cathy Wilkerson was ironing bed sheets when the floor collapsed under her feet. A bomb had detonated in the subbasement of her parent's Greenwich Village townhouse . Cathy and another woman walked away but their friends Teddy Gold , Terry Robbins and Diane Oughton were dead. I...
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Just in case you didn't notice it, there's been a crevice that's opened up on Tony Abbott's long road to the Lodge. A crevice that in just a few days has opened up to bloody great yawning credibility gap. It was just last week, in the wake of the Qantas fiasco, and the critisi...
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"Forecasting Private Consumption: Survey-Based Indicators vs. Google Trends", SIMEON VOSEN* AND TORSTEN SCHMIDT, RWI, Essen, Germany ABSTRACT In this study we introduce a new indicator for private consumption based on search query time series provided by Google Trends. The ind...
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On the suggestion, some time ago, of Ian Marsh, I finally caught up with the New Democracy Foundation a few weeks ago. Not surprisingly we got on well. I've always been keen on things like consensus conferences - which bring the deliberation of a jury to wider social and polit...
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My post at CDU Law and Business Online .
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Well blow me down. If it isn't Jevons in the Powerhouse Museum coming here as the son of a bankrupt family and making good as Assayer to the Sydney mint, becoming the first photojournalist in Australia, discovering the El-Nino effect, writing an ethnography of the uncouth of S...
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The Senate Economic References Committee has this week released its findings on the supermarket milk discounting war . The main findings, blessedly, were that cheaper milk really is good for consumers and that there was nothing obviously awry with the competitive market that g...
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Un-occupy: Nearly 70 students walked out of Greg Mankiw's economics class at Harvard on Wednesday afternoon. According to the Harvard Crimson's Jose Delreal , "The walkout was meant to be a show of support for the 'Occupy' movement’s principal criticism that conservative econo...
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Perhaps it's the Christian roots of our civilisation. Perhaps it's innate in many of us, but I've never understood the business about to forgive is divine. It's natural. Even if people have done really bad things, if you think they are genuinely sorry, your heart goes out to t...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=PoD84TVdD-4 I know you're all on the edges of your seats about how Kaggle is going. The answer is "very well". We've just announced the closure of Series A funding. And you can read all about it in the New York Times , the...
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Human beings only play when they are in the full sense of the word human and they are only fully human when they play. Friedrich Shiller Games seem frivolous. They can stand as metaphors for life, but typically, the outcome of games doesn't really matter. I wanted Collingwood...
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