Category Archives: Geeky Musings

Thinking aloud about all manner of voodoo and geekery from resident Club Troppo geeks.

Back of the envelope demography.

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A warning, this is pretty much a shaggy dog story.

A while ago I had an idle thought about migrant settlement patterns. If there was a slight tendency amongst Chinese Australians to settle in ways that reflected subnational cultures from China (I was prompted by the Sydney suburb of Ashfield which is distinctly Shanghainese, not just Chinese), would the same tendency be visible in Indian Australians. After all, India is also vast and linguistically diverse, but has a far shorter history of unified statehood. Were there Punjabi and Bengali districts to go with the Shanghainese or Cantonese districts? I asked some bemused shopkeepers who did not have this impression. I then asked someone who may have looked at this as a professional (having published work on Indian migrants to Australia), a Professor Supriya Singh at RMIT. She kindly replied to my query (and I quote in part)

We have asked the question also but found there is no predominantly Indian suburb, and no  Punjabi, Malyali, Gujerati or Andhra concentration.

…

In the media there has been comment that Point Cook is developing into a very Indian suburb, with every third house being Indian. But there is no hint that it is concentrated in any one region of India. However when you look at Census distribution maps, there are no areas of Indian concentration in the way that there are Chinese, Italian or Greek cultural precincts or clusters.

This was striking in another way. Not only no clustering of subnational groups, but no clustering at all. Not only did this seem unusual compared to other migrant groups, it also seemed unusual compared to Sydney. Afterall my subjective experience would cite suburbs like Parramatta and the adjacent Harris Park, as well as other places as having a distinct Indian presence – I’d go there to try subcontinental sweets – and they were used as natural sites for cultural events like Parramasala, or a A.R Rahman concert. Maybe there was a difference between the cities. So I knocked up some maps of people born in India recorded in the 2006 census.

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Two updates – Real time bus maps and Filipino restaurants

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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, through the Apps4NSW competition, Flink Labs has produced this prototype for Sydney and Newcastle buses. I think it’s great. I may have anticipated the means by which it would come (Google maps and Government 2.0) but I got the timing way out – I thought it would take years. Hopefully the new government will run with it so it becomes more phone friendly.

The other relates to my speculations on the paucity of Filipino restaurants. One hypothesis I didn’t mention is that Filipino migrants might be less prone than  other migrant groups to cluster into certain suburbs (the way we can see suburbs that are notably “Greek” or “Vietnamese” for instance), so that that a given restaurant would struggle to have a local returning customer base within it’s own community. This could be plausible if Filipino migrants have better English skills (due to American colonialism) and are therefore less likely to seek other speakers of their language to live near. Alternatively, the gender imbalance and associated exogamy may mean they are more geographically spread out.

I didn’t feel this hypothesis explained much (hence I didn’t mention it), but I kept it in mind. The other day I was using CData to map 2006 census data on migrant groups for an unrelated question (on which I’ll probably post in future), but this gave me the opportunity to compare Filipino settlement to some other groups. Notably I compared residency in Sydney and Melbourne by people born in the Phillipines with those born in two other countries, Korea and India. I chose these two because their periods of migration roughly coincide with Filipino migration, so they’d be facing similar house prices and job opportunities which would alter their choices relative to post war migrants. Additionally, unlike the Vietnamese or Lebanese (or more recently East Africans), there’d be no refugee aspect where settlement would be dictated by government decisions. Furthermore, Korean and Indian restaurants are abundant. The comparison is still flawed of course.

The maps (and some notes) are below the fold. I can see some element of greater concentration amongst Koreans and Indians, at least in Sydney (and in places where you’d find many restaurants in said cuisines), but not nearly enough to explain the disparity. The concentration of Filipinos in the spur of settlement between Blacktown and Penrith is notable – half the Filipino restaurants I know of in Sydney are in Blacktown (i.e two). Maybe there’s a lack of suitable commercial real estate there?

I don’t think there’s more for this hypothesis though, but you can look for yourself.

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Holiday fun times: Define Asia

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Given it’s still the offseason, I thought we might want to revisit an passtime of a previous time. When I was a child in the 90s, during the Keating era, there was a fairly pointless question (they never bothered to actually debate it); Is Australia part of Asia? Whilst the question did have implications for membership in various diplomatic clubs, here it was usually framed as part of culture wars inanity. For me, finding the implications rather mild, it’s mainly an academic diversion.

And the problem, as I see it, isn’t determining where Australia belongs, or whether belonging in one category precludes belonging in others (like “The West” or “The Anglosphere”). It’s working out what “Asia” is anyway. Can we really come up with a non-arbitrary definition that includes every country we usually call Asia without including Australia?

The most basic definition is geographic. Things within certain bounds are “Asia”. Things outside it are not Asian. This is the basis for the map at right. There’s obvious problems here though. Oceans are big, so drawing a border at say, the Pacific (excluding North America) or the Indian Ocean (excluding Antarctica), but if you can jump the Malacca straits or the Richard Green Sea [fn1] or any of the other innumerable straits and seas that separate islands from the continental mass, why suddenly say that the Timor Sea or Torres Strait is too far, let alone the tiny rivulet of the Suez Canal? And if you can cross the Himalayas, taller than any other, why balk at the modesty of the Urals, or the Caucasus mountains. If there was something beneath it all, as is literally the case with plate tectonics, we might have something, but there is a mass of plates underneath “Asia”, Australia shares a plate with parts of Indonesia (“Asian” by common consent) and almost all of Europe and all of China is on a single plate.

So geographically there is little case for excluding Australia from Asia, and even less for excluding Europe. To exclude them would be to determine that Asia is defined by whatever boundaries we draw, and on that basis we may as well include Mars.

Even so, the map is too broad for the debate of my childhood. They weren’t asking how Australia related to Tajikistan (with whom we do not have an embassy) or the “Asia” referred to by the ancient Mediterraneans (which made more sense given the limited geographic knowledge of the times) – now better known as “The Middle East”. What the 90s debates referred to was more likely something called “East and South East Asia”. The “Asia” closest to us. Continue reading →

X marks the trust spot

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Here is a story about the internet working the way tech utopians think it should. Technology is as good or as bad as the social conditions of which it is a part, but this is one of the good stories. It can be read either as a perfect example of self interest working well in the aggregate, or less cynically as a kind of altruism when there may not be a payoff.

Some years ago I subscribed to a Firefox addon called Xmarks (which used to be Foxmarks). This program syncs bookmarks not just to the cloud but to other computers, cross platform. Kind of useful, but for me it soon dropped into the background like teapots or car keys; used frequently but not very front of consciousness.
I was surprised therefore to get an email from the company a couple of months ago. Sorrowfully, it informed me that the service would be discontinued as from January next year. Could I move to one of a number of competitor alternatives as they were shutting down the whole service?   Continue reading →

Two kinds of digital people?

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This post is what I would have written as a comment on Nicholas’s post Listen2Learners: 1 but it got a bit big. So is this post.

The following lines of his post sparked my attention

I impressed upon Peter the extent to which the online world of web 2.0 is one in which people are just doing it for themselves, with all the tools available for free online – YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, widgets, mashup platforms like Google Maps and on and on. And that doing things like building mashups on Google Maps or learning stats by competing for Dream Team points could really turn kids on.

But I went on to say that the worst thing one could do if one agreed with what I was saying would be to spend time and money skilling up teachers to teach this stuff.  They wouldn’t want to – or many wouldn’t and they wouldn’t be any good at it.

I suggested instead that those students who were enthusiasts could teach others, and spread things that way.

This is educationally a good idea for lots of reasons. Students tend to perform better at things they think they are good at, for one thing. Students whom teachers think are bright also tend to come up to the mark, no matter their starting point, for another. Being picked out to teach other students suggests that the teacher thinks you’re bright.

Vygotsky, the educationalist, talks about ‘zones of proximal development’ by which he means roughly that the things the other students around a learner are doing profoundly influences that learners view of what is learned and capacity to learn it. The approach of students teaching students enhances the creation of ‘zones of proximal development’, so it’s a good there as well.

In addition it has certainly been my experience that teachers can be very disinterested in Web 2.0 applications, or indeed software for learning.

However, I also think this observation of Nicholas’s falls into what I think of as the ‘Prensky trap’.

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Congratulations Toby Evans, whoever and wherever you are

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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 probably meet him at the Mont Pelerin Conference in Sydney next month because part of the prize is a ticket to the event. This year the international guests will include Peter Boettke of  The Austrian Economists, now Coordination Problem and Terence Kealey ($4 well spent). 

Getting back to the statement of liberal principles, this came from a Mont Pelerin paper on “Public Opinion and Liberal Principles” which is relevant to the recent Troppo post on attempts to manipulate public opinion by media games.

Sydney Uni book fair

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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 demonstrating how he held the ball for his off-break.

John J  Ray, Conservatism as Heresy (1974). $2. An absolute classic! Many years ahead of its time. You can read it all on line at John Ray’s website.

The chapter on the 1974  election is a surprise.

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