Well the ABC God bless its cotton socks can’t quite bring itself to mount videos that can be embedded elsewhere – or I can’t see a way to do it, but they did a great story on Kaggle tonight – so I thought I’d post it here. Just click here and all will be revealed.
Update: someone has emailed me some code which enables me to frame the video here.
Several years ago I posted a graphic plotting countrys GDP per head against mean lifetime and drawing attention to the tragic loss of life in southern Africa, mainly due to AIDS. There is a fantastic data visualisation tool called GapMinder that tells this story and other stories- much more clearly. And it is really fun to play with.
A good while back I put up a post on all the ways I liked Platinum Capital. I hope some of you were suitably convinced to have invested. Just as Kier Neilson (the firm’s founder) made his name in the 1987 crash, this is how Platinum international fund has performed recently. The Y-axis doesn’t seem to have come out – but the lines start at $10,000 and Platinum is now at ~ $9,000 with the index at ~ 7,250. Of course cash might have been better, but then you’ve gotta be in it to win it!
My abiding and irrational loathing for Wordpress has at last yielded fruit.
Wordpress thrives in the classic shared hosting market, where the LAMP stack — Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP — is almost universally installed. It’s free, fairly user-friendly, well-marketed, widely used, has oodles of third party plugins and themes. My only objection to Wordpress is that it’s rubbish11. Har Har: Yes, I realise I’m saying this on a Wordpress website. Sometimes the poor workman doesn’t get to choose his tools. [↩].
But that’s not my point today. What Wordpress has given me is the impetus to think, and think, and think some more about what blogging software is and what it should do. The dozen or so computer types who follow Club Troppo have seen my sketches in this direction before. Starting with a pre-history of blogging, I moved through a call for a “next generation”, through to consideration of the various interested participants in the world of blogging software. Later I returned to the topic of Wordpress to complain about its architecture, then foreshadowed this post with remarks about a PHP performance benchmark.
My topic today is a discussion of how and why I think shared hosting is doomed. Let me start with a chart which I think will attract no argument22. About the charts: All charts in this post are illustrative, not data-driven. So YMMAPWV. [↩]:
I seem to be the only one, that I have seen anyway, in the Australian blogosphere who is excited about the 37c tax bracket going the way of the dodo in Labor’s tax policy announcement. Peter Martin even suggested it might be bad politics. Hopefully this policy becomes ‘common wisdom’ and the removal of the 37c tax bracket enacted no matter who the party in power is as it simplifies the tax system drastically and removes bracket creep for many income tax payers. Some graphs to visualise what a tax system without the 37c bracket would look like. The data for these graphs is from the 2003-2004 Tax Statistics which is the most up-to-date data publicly available from the ATO.
Note that the 30c tax bracket under Labor’s 2013 policy stretches from 37K to 180K. It becomes a long tail tax with the 15c bracket covering the head of the taxable income curve. The 40c bracket in raw numbers covers a very small minority of taxable individuals.
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The AES has an interesting graph which shows trending on how people consumed political information during elections. Unfortunately the trend ends at 2004, however, the internet was already rivaling talkback radio, newspapers and radio for media consumption patterns.
I am sure that the ‘internet’ includes mainstream media sites such as the SMH, Australian and so forth as well as independent media and blogs. It would be interesting to see those same figures for 2007 as well as a breakdown of mass media websites, independent media (a-la crikey) and citizen political sites (such as blogs).
