From the soon to be published "PISA 2012 Results: Creative Problem Solving", OECD

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Yo5cKRmJaf0 I have almost certainly fulminated in various asides against TED talks on this blog, and even one full on cri de coeur against retail profundification . (I promised one on business class profundification but I...

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Much of the time, the public can make up its own mind on public events once it get a decent helping of facts; the theatre commentary from the parliamentary press gallery – a little of which I used to write – is more entertainment than vital input. But on the running of the par...

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Here are the top picks from the German Film Festival in Melbourne, with the full schedule below. The Phantom|Das Phantom 06.00pm Friday 28 March @ Palace Cinema Como | 06.15pm Tuesday 8 April @ Palace Cinema Como After the partner of a policeman is killed he is drawn into a my...

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The current inquiry into institutional child abuse holds some interesting lessons about the nature of religion, which I'll stay clear of here. But it also holds a larger lesson about the ability of organisations to act morally and to act properly in the absence of external reg...

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Many people say the best way to influence government is to give policymakers practical solutions to problems they care about. According to this perspective, academics and think tanks scholars can get it wrong by spending too much time analysing problems and their causes. Polic...

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This doco is worth watching for its own sake. (Why are media organisations so dumb and unprepared to allow embedding of their videos - given that the vids themselves come with ads that are hard to avoid - but I digress …) What struck me is how different it would be today. The...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZwFaSpca_3Q

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Suicide and Property Rights in India by Siwan Anderson, Garance Genicot - #19978 (DEV) This paper studies the impact of female property rights on male and female suicide rates in India. Using state level variation in legal changes to women's property rights, we show that bette...

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Pretty interesting paper (pdf). The abstract: We examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation. To assess this, we begin by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier....

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Michael Fullilove, of the Lowy Institute, last week gave a speech espousing the established (non-radical) centrist view that more immigration to Australia is highly desirable - that migration is an essential step to A Bigger Australia. I like immigration. In fact, my gut suppo...

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The noise and drama surrounding Putin, Russia and the Ukraine obscure crucial foreign policy principles. In "Lord Salisbury's Lessons for Great Powers" , Robert Merry takes a closer look at what they might be. First, avoid promiscuous jingoism of the kind that Salisbury despis...

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https://youtu.be/-9q-sMsXLHs I was bemoaning ethics committees to someone the other day and they told me of this case in which Australian Hospitals refused a patient - a nurse who had done her homework - aggressive chemotherapy for her MS. The ethics committee knew better. So...

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One year ago our daughter died and was born. We called her Sakura, for the cherry blossom. Sakura is a thing of beauty that does not, and cannot last, longer than a short time. But we meet its brief time in this world with joy and not sorrow. Not surprisingly, I guess, thinkin...

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“This hand is not the color of yours. But if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hand, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be the same color as yours. I am a man.” Standing Bear to a Nebraska court, May 1879. More here . HT Three Quarks

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I recall seeing an exciting young player from Canberra at a Doberl Cup about seven or eight years ago. (The Doberl Cup is a regular fixture of the Canberra calendar. The comp was endowed by Mr Doberl with enough money so that the best from Australia and a few additional grandm...

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I don't pretend to understand the detail of the current situation between Russia and Ukraine, but it seems entirely reasonable to fear that this may well be the most significant threat to world peace since the Berlin Wall Crisis and Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 1960s. Eve...

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Vanavil is a school for the poorest of the poor in the middle of Tamil Nadu, India. It started in 2005 as an orphanage/school for the children of two historically nomadic communities left stranded by the devastating tsunami of 2004. Many of the children of these two communitie...

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