What if we held an Australian broadband crisis and nobody came? That's pretty much what happened in Australian broadband policy over the decade to 2025. Governments, forecasters and the media can all learn lessons from this episode. Illustration: Fibre optic cable in a Telstra...
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As you can see we've adopted a new Wordpress theme. Many thanks to our web guru Tony Sarhanis. What do you think? I really like it, although I have one reservation. You can't scroll down the main posts column until the cursor gets to the bottom of the comments column. I suspec...
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The twin threats of "hidden persuasion" and artificial intelligence have now convinced most of us that Google and its ilk are almost uniquely powerful. These threats are overrated. The digital giants can do less than we fear – and we risk regulating them where we should not. 1...
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I. Introduction Some prefer iPhones. Others prefer Android. These are the two standards left standing for what only old guys call smartphones. 'Standards wars' like this have arisen throughout history. No doubt readers can provide examples back to the ancient world, but the sw...
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It's here, the booklet I am sure you have all been waiting for. The one which Gigi Foster and Michael Baker slaved over for 10 months . It is also on Kindle . It is dedicated to all the victims of the Panic, in poor countries and rich countries. They include our children, the...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, Print media, History, Humour, Education, Literature, Society, Religion, Theatre, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Terror, Science, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Health, Political theory, Law, Dance, Review, Bargains, Travel, WOW! - Amazing, Social, Parenting, Ethics, Medical, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Social Policy, Democracy, Employment, Sortition and citizens’ juries, Isegoria, Coronavirus crisis
Since I learned in April 2020 that transmission of covid was mainly via extremely small aerosols, I have regarded face masks as a placebo: they are to aerosols what garden gates are to mosquitoes. Yet, placebos have a role so I wasn't too against them and willing to have my as...
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What do you do as an Australian parliament when a foreign company censors mainstream media content in Australia, undermining free speech ? Do you organise an inquiry to hold those foreign companies to account and to see how you might prevent foreign meddling? Or do you fall in...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Print media, Society, Films and TV, IT and Internet, Journalism, Media, Cultural Critique, Democracy, Coronavirus crisis
Societies are evolving and complex, which often makes it hard to see at any moment where things are going. It was thus with the move of Northern European countries towards democracy in the 19 th century, which seems inevitable and clear in hindsight but blurred at the time by...
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Posted in History, Humour, Education, Theatre, IT and Internet, Geeky Musings, Climate Change, Business, Immigration and refugees, bubble, Social, Bullshit, Employment
The essential governance problem in March 2020 in Western countries was the overwhelming demand of the vast majority of the population to do something dramatic in response to their fear. There was a clamour to be ‘led to safety’ by populations scared to death by images in the...
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Posted in Politics - international, Society, IT and Internet, Terror, Science, Health, Metablogging, Information, Innovation, Democracy, Coronavirus crisis
News Corp is telling us what Google should really pay for linking to its sites. It's telling us in code – HTML code. And the answer is ... $0.00. What is an Internet link worth to the linker? For most of the Internet's life, this question has been pointless. On the Internet, l...
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2020 was certainly a roller coaster for a social scientist, full of surprises. Let me not once again bemoan the increasingly coordinated attack on all sources of vitality in Western civilisation, but look ahead and openly wonder about what 2021 will bring in terms of 7 specifi...
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Posted in Uncategorized, Politics - national, Politics - international, Humour, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Science, Social, Cultural Critique, Medical, Social Policy, Democracy, Coronavirus crisis
Stock markets give us a glimpse what people with money have deduced about world events before they happen. Investors can make mistakes, sometimes terrible mistakes, but they are honest mistakes: you don’t buy a stock at a 100 if you actually honestly believe that same stock wi...
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How are we going to escape the authoritarian nightmare and regain our liberties and zest for life? This long read is written for organisers of new Covistance initiatives, explaining the logic of what others have done and what could further be done. So I am speaking to those of...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, IT and Internet, Science, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Health, Law, Information, Parenting, Death and taxes, Democracy, Coronavirus crisis
Till 20 year ago, IQ scores in the West increased about 3 points per decade ever since the 1920s, a phenomenon known as the “Flynn effect”. That rise in IQ test scores, which have an average of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, was attributed to improved schooling, improved...
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Posted in Uncategorized, History, Education, IT and Internet, Science, Gender, Media, Social, Parenting, Public and Private Goods, Inequality, Employment
[in progress: will add more references, links and latest numbers when I get the time] In this note, I want to deal with three related issues: the main lessons on the corona virus from the reported deaths across countries with different policies; the feasibility of different “e...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Education, Society, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Science, Libertarian Musings, Health, Social, Cultural Critique, Death and taxes, Social Policy, Democracy, Employment, Coronavirus crisis
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1225553117929988097?s=20 If you know anything about the latest State of the Union Address, you know that after Donald Trump had handed Nancy Pelosi his speech as if she were his secretary when she held out her hand to him to shake han...
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Are you dismayed at getting 100 emails a day you need to wade through, disturbing your concentration? Does your administration bother you constantly with things you just ‘have to be aware of’? Are you tired of the ‘executive reports’, ‘award notices’, 'compulsory breathing tra...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7tvauOJMHo Lateral Economics has been commissioned by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to estimate the value of the Australian Census to the Australian community. As part of that exercise we've got the go-ahead from ABS to do something...
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The probability of a massive nuclear war the next 10 years between any of the 8 current nuclear powers (US, UK, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, NK, Israel) seems low. The bluster of the leaders is supposed to make the threat look a bit bigger than it is in order to get negoti...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, Environment, History, Humour, Education, Literature, Society, Religion, IT and Internet, Terror, Science, Geeky Musings, Health, Climate Change, Ask Troppo's Love Gods, Dance, Space, Chess, Social, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Death and taxes, Democracy
In the dynamic media environment we have in Australia, broadcasting regulation has become an exceptionally tricky exercise. If regulations are to work, they require creative application and on-going monitoring as commercial players will always seek to outmanoeuvre them, especi...
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The US political establishment is now firmly of the belief that the US is still the world’s dominant superpower, and that they could easily win a cold-war confrontation with China , just like it overwhelmed the Soviet Union with economic firepower. I think the Americans are ba...
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Cross posted from John Menadue's Pearls and Irritations NBN Co claims their ‘focus remains strongly on improving customer experience on the network including a smooth connection to the network.’ In fact the experience is a fiasco. Bill Shorten says the dysfunctional NBN needs...
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Cross-posted from John Menadue's Pearls and Irritations . The ABC has been an extraordinarily resilient organisation. It has withstood management and Board upheavals, survived remorseless budget cuts and harassment. But the current attacks on staff and on its role are as overt...
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In the engine room of nation states, ie the tax departments, the coming battle with platform providers is taking shape. Uber, airbnb, facebook, linkedin, ebay, jobseek, and a myriad of specialised platform providers facilitate micro-trades that are largely untaxed by the autho...
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Posted in Politics - national, Politics - international, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, regulation, Political theory, Law, Information, Intellectual Monopoly Privileges, Innovation, Social, Intellectual Property, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Employment
https://youtu.be/tXlM99xPQC8 Well there's been a frisson of excitement in the chess and AI world lately with the extraordinary performance of AlphaZero – essentially the computer that mastered the game Go – a game which proved, despite the relative simplicity of its rules, a m...
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[expanded from the post on JohnMenadue] When Bitcoin went public in 2009 it introduced to the world of finance and economics the technology of blockchain. Even the many who thought Bitcoin would never make it as a major currency were intrigued by the BlockChain technology and...
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Posted in Politics - national, History, IT and Internet, Science, Climate Change, Political theory, Business, Information, bubble, Innovation, Social Policy
The #MeToo flood of stories of women who feel abused by men – ranging from lurid stares to straightforward rape – seems like a disaster to me for the Democrats. Not because of the stories themselves, but because of how the progressive media and commentators have reacted to it....
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Posted in Life, Philosophy, Miscellaneous, Humour, Religion, IT and Internet, Gender, Media, Libertarian Musings, Health, Law, Information, bubble, Social, Cultural Critique, Bullshit
[Note to self. Geeks only] Over the fold I muse on the nature of human intelligence, social intelligence, and the options for artificial intelligence to become 'smarter than humans' in the areas of social power and law-making. It is taken for granted that you accept that in ha...
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Let me indulge, purely for entertainment value, in some fan-speculation on what we will see on-screen after the Long Night is over and the final 6 episodes Of Game of Thrones are run in 2019. Let me first talk about the end-game aspects I think the books and the tv-series seem...
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Posted in Uncategorized, Uncategorised, Politics - international, Life, Philosophy, Print media, Environment, History, Miscellaneous, Humour, Education, Literature, Society, Religion, Films and TV, Sport-general, Theatre, Music, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Food, Terror, Science, Art and Architecture, regulation, Gender, Journalism, Media, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Health, Climate Change, Political theory, Metablogging, Law, Dance, Space, Review, Startup, Products, Travel, Immigration and refugees, Information, bubble, WOW! - Amazing, Social, Parenting, Race and indigenous, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Medical, Public and Private Goods, Death and taxes, Inequality, Personal, Social Policy, Democracy, Bullshit, Indigenous, Employment
Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men by Mark Aguiar, Mark Bils, Kerwin Kofi Charles, Erik Hurst Abstract: Younger men, ages 21 to 30, exhibited a larger decline in work hours over the last fifteen years than older men or women. Since 2004, time-use data show that...
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One of the privileges of access to what we cool kids call the "back end" of Troppo is that when I write a long, long comment , in an old thread that has taken a new direction, I can make it the start of a new thread. As I'm doing here. Note that the comment originally arose fr...
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Well I've been going on and on about it , but here's an academic paper contrasting the free rider problem and opportunity. Knowledge Properties and Economic Policy: A New Look By Antonelli, Cristiano (University of Turin) This paper explores the full range of effects of knowle...
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Time was (I'm guessing, if it was it didn't last long) when linkbait had standards . You (I'm obviously still guessing here) took some aspect of something and beat it up a bit. Anyway courtesy of ZergNet (who knew) I just saw this bit of linkbait. George Michael's Ex-Wham! Par...
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One of the central contemporary critiques of the industrial revolution was its undermining of crafts and craftsmanship. Today this is happening within the world of ideas. And at least right now, it's looking like this is not a very happy development. This was brought home to m...
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Setting appointments I'll be attending in London next week on Google Calendar has reminded me of a problem that online calendars haven't sorted out - at least to my satisfaction (or perhaps knowledge); how to handle appointments when there are differences between time zones. I...
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In part 1, I looked at whether it made sense to have random individuals inserted into parliament, or to let policies be decided by juries full of randomly chosen individuals. Both were argued to be unworkable and likely to lead to more corruption, rather than less: policies th...
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Posted in Politics - national, Life, Philosophy, Print media, History, Miscellaneous, Education, Society, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, regulation, Journalism, Libertarian Musings, Political theory, Law, Web and Government 2.0, Information, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Social Policy, Democracy
Lateral Economics has had occasion to compile a list of free, freemium and cheap services to help run your one person micro or several person small business. I post it here for your interest and because it may be useful to you. The latest service I discovered to my delight was...
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Apparently Labor doesn't intend reverting to the full Fibre to the Premises ("FTP") version of the National Broadband Network it previously championed if returned to government later this year: The opposition leader admitted that he would not unpick all of the Coalition’s chan...
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My forward to Deloitte's second report on digital money - The future of exchanging value: Cryptocurrencies and the trust economy. Exchanging value Ice becomes water when warmed. Only familiarity prevents us from marvelling at the mysteriousness of this ‘phase change’, as physi...
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As I've argued elsewhere, most public debates on policy - and I suspect on pretty much everything else - tend to take place as culture wars. In a culture war the 'sides' are well defined - usually mapping pretty well onto 'left' and 'right' terrain. The identities of the vario...
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When Adam Smith said that "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public" I read that statement broadly. He clearly intended to refer to business people seeking to monopolise the ma...
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With the Internet being a regular feature of our lives for about 20 years now, what have been the related developments that were hard to pick at the outset? What are the lessons? Five thoughts: Communication and personal expression is the main business of the Internet. That wa...
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Posted in Philosophy, History, Miscellaneous, IT and Internet, Economics and public policy, Science, Libertarian Musings, Geeky Musings, Political theory, Business, Information, Innovation, Best From Elsewhere, Cultural Critique, Public and Private Goods
Last week I participated in a panel discussion that kicked off Melbourne Knowledge Week. MKW is a Good Thing that has been running for a few years. It was initiated by Melbourne City Council against the background thought that knowledge is becoming progressively more important...
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https://youtu.be/4cAHL4LMNlY This observation is hardly a blindingly new insight, but it struck me that the video above is a kind of landmark. Google was the company that was information focused, engineering focused - and pretty good at user experience (UX) and all that stuff...
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I've written about what I call irreducibility at least twice before . Then along comes this nice article in the excellent new publication The Mandarin on the " 19 reasons why agencies find it hard to hire technologists ". It's a classic case of how top down systems don't manag...
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In answer to my post earlier today about the data retention bill, frequent commenter Patrick Fitzgerald made a rather important point about the data retention zeitgeist: Embrace the panopticon Ken, buy yourself a webcam, attach it to your head and stream live 24×7. Plus for go...
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Monday's column in the Fin published as "Debate should be on best-use, not ownership of public data" Data is in the news but we’re still working out how to think about it. Ladies and Gentlemen, we’ve got the Wrong Metaphor. Let me explain. There’s endless argy-bargy about who...
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As readers will know, I've been a fan of the way in which the internet generates reputational information which greatly improves the efficiency of markets. Still it's surprising how tricky these things are, something I've been pondering while using Airbnb for quite a few stays...
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[caption id="attachment_26524" align="alignright" width="140"] IPKats love a tweet[/caption] The lecture will be delivered (in Melbourne Sydney and Brisbane) by Jeremy Phillips. Jeremy (or more exactly a fictional and " notorious " cat: the IPKat) has three times, been named a...
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Just a note to record the fact that blogging is 20 years old this month, maybe. New media legend Dave Winer, a rare combination of great writer and programmer, started posting at DaveNet on 7 October 1994 , as Philip Greenspun points out. There was no announcement that Winer h...
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This post is mostly a note to self: Like I keep saying, there's an ecology between public and private goods. This article asks whether smartphones should be used in meetings. That's a question about a cultural rule. It's a public good question. The article however seeks the an...
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The latest cost-benefit analysis of various Australian broadband proposals is out. It's part of a report from an inquiry chaired by former Victorian Treasury head Mike Vertigan. And it says in essence that Australia's expected growth in demand for bandwidth is big enough to ma...
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I managed to trigger the warning email below, presumably by installing Gmail Meter. But I've uninstalled it. It comes every day or so. The first link generates a "Forbidden: Error 403" while the latter link invites me to do some programing at Google Developer. I can't unsubscr...
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In case anyone's interested I did an interview on ‘my trip’ overseas recently which if you fancy a bit of light and slightly educational entertainment is here . Anyway, the main burden of my remarks is that we’re losing ground within the leaders group on eGov and Government 2....
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In case anyone's interested, I did an interview on "My Trip" which can be downloaded from this link .
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Ben Hills has a new book out - Stop the Presses! How Greed, Incompetence (and the Internet) Wrecked Fairfax . It's published by (surprise!) News Corp's HarperCollins. Its essential thesis is that the Fairfax media group, owner of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, is in tr...
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From a recent column for the AFR . The report can be downloaded here . Earlier this year our Treasurer, Joe Hockey, led the G20 Finance Ministers to pledge lifting GDP by 2 percent over ‘business as usual’ over the next five years. It’s a big win for the Treasurer, but how can...
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Book Translations as Idea Flows: The Effects of the Collapse of Communism on the Diffusion of Knowledge by Ran Abramitzky, Isabelle Sin Abstract: We use book translations as a new measure of international idea flows and study the effects of Communism's collapse in Eastern Euro...
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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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Attentive Troppodillians will recall Rooter , one of Troppo's stable of cars, frequently flown to locations around the world in order for the winners of our comps to to take do a few doughies with it. Now comes the learned journal article on Rooter (pdf). It's a hoax generated...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNTk29zXl4A OK so you all kind of know this, but I'm going to go out on a limb and just put it out there as one younger member of my family has been heard to say. It's depressing how much stuff is sent our way which repackages what's already in...
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It may not prove much, or rather it proves the obvious - that stuff that makes its way between two pieces of land tends to take place over the sea - but it's kind of fun.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kz1XBcWI6LM Above is my presentation to the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society - the background blurb of which is here . You'll find the first half of the presentation on the fractal ecology of public and private goods is effectively the sa...
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Prologue to a blog post: Gentle Troppodillians, as you know, we keep up with the times here at Troppo. Some people like to think just five minutes ahead. Here at Troppo we're focused on the long-term - eons are seconds in TroppoTime - or seconds are eons depending on the way y...
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I'm a fan of Angel-list and have invested in two companies already over the platform (as trustee for Club Troppo's 4.7 billion self-managed super fund). Here's the disclaimer which you verify before you get to invest. I like it, though even here I'd rather just one or two clea...
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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="406"] Emotiv Insight & Google Glass on Emotiv CTO, Dr Geoffrey Mackellar.[/caption]
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Here are some headlines marking various milestones of progress and regress in the Government 2.0 agenda. As we recommended in the Cutler Report donations to the global commons are growing apace. Meanwhile it's not surprising that the Scandinavians, who are some of the most imp...
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Campaigners seem to be having some success in raising the profile of writers and others giving away the product of their labour for free. The first time I ran into this issue in any big way was in launching the Government 2.0 Taskforce with a design competition. The prize? The...
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Dear Nokia, I hear you have fallen on hard times. I have two product suggestions: 1. Make a mobile that is purely a telephone 2. Make a phone in the shape of a pen The two could well be combined. 1. Pure phone There are countless millions of older people who would appreciate a...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NluKzkEuo3A As part of its Gruen Nation show, an ad was produced which Clive Palmer wanted to use in his campaign. Well it was public money that produced it, so why shouldn't he be able to use it? Now in fact there may be complications. Gruen Nat...
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Malware is slowing down my Mac :( For a month or so I had a small Bing sponsored magnifying glass appear over all graphics. Then it went. But now, whenever I'm on a news-site I get a 'Discovery Bar' appearing at the bottom of my screen. It only appears in Chrome which I use as...
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Felix Barbalet is a data scientist and economist working in Canberra who has recently launched http://www.APSindex.com and https://www.APSjobs.info . He is a good fellow and on discussing his new websites with him, I suggested that he give us a post about the remarkable produc...
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I was visiting Wikipedia a couple of days ago when I happened upon the image to the right. "Ah, a new feature, how nice." I thought. Then a click took me to a dead standard Bing search. The "What's this?" text didn't activate anything. I thought "well that is odd, Wikipedia is...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1uyQZNg2vE
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I'm doing some research for a talk I'm giving in New Zealand to heads of private schools - the invitation for which came from a similar talk I gave to the Australian Heads of Independent Schools Association. I'm sruiking the wonders of education 2.0 about which I've waxed and...
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I wrote a good while ago about the economics of doing well by doing good on the internet and when I received a curious email from someone with whom I was conducting a correspondence I decided to write the column below. I've just tried to find it on Google, and it seems I didn'...
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Something I picked up recently in San Francisco. OK I don't own it, but got to play with one waiting in a queue and talking to a developer waiting to get into a function at the conference I was attending. I was impressed. It looks a bit weird, but you ignore it until you want...
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Today's column in the Age and SMH Public private partnerships (PPPs) haven't been such a happy experiment. Using private money to build arterial roads just increases their cost because private capital requires much higher returns than government borrowing. But I've long wonder...
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People of Groupon, After four and a half intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I've decided that I'd like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding - I was fired today. If you're wondering why ... you haven't been paying attention. From controversial metrics in...
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http://youtu.be/5WCTn4FljUQ
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Osper is a smart new London startup. Here's its pitch to Angel investors . Osper is a cash card for young people with a mobile banking app with login for mum and dad (with parental controls) and login for young people (which teaches responsible money management). The cash card...
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Here's a short note to everyone I know in the print media industry; Please, when you bemoan the state of media today, do not tell me that it's "management" that has got the industry where it is. I hear this all the time, particularly from Fairfax staffers and ex-staffers. If o...
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Get a load of the UK Cabinet Office Minister's delivery. http://youtu.be/o-m6l4keQc8 It's fabulously low key, informal, indeed intimate compared with the formal bullshitting mode of almost all political utterance, and straightforward. It is of course 'spin', as it couldn't be...
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In physics we're used to the idea that at different scales and at different stages of some process, very different things happen. We inhabit Newton's world of medium sized things and speeds - planets, trees, footballs and travel at walking, driving or flying speed - even space...
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I've been talking about this kind of stuff for a fair while in presentations and intimated similar things in some longer pieces and a column or two on Adam Smith and Web 2.0, but I've not done a column on Web 2.0 as public goods privately built. But I have now . THERE'S a revo...
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Interesting piece by well-known IT figure Jeff Atwood: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/09/computer-crime-then-and-now.html On one level, this piece is a terrific summary of how hacking is done. It's mostly not about messing with computers; it's about messing with people....
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The graphic below comes from the University of Michigan's Professor Mark Perry, who runs a libertarian and market-oriented blog called Carpe Diem . It shows, essentially, the collapse of the advertising revenue stream in US newspapers. Adjusted for inflation, US newspapers wil...
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Herewith the column of two reports for the Australian Digital Alliance on copyright exceptions. Sounds abstruse but it's quite engaging methinks. On December 17, 1903, after years of tinkering with his brother Wilbur, Orville Wright took to the skies at Kitty Hawk, North Carol...
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http://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE Steve is all the rage. Run your company like Steve Jobs. Do nuclear physics like Einstein. I doubt anyone should try to run their company like Steve Jobs. But that doesn't stop it being interesting to listen to things he says. In any event, I ran in...
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Having promised myself that I'd buy a Mac when they brought out a netbook sized MacBook Air, I did just that about nine months ago. I got forced out of Macdom many yearsafter I began on a Mac in 1986 I've been meaning to write a review of my experience FWIW but haven't got rou...
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Right now Ray Finkelstein and Matthew Ricketson, the two members of the federal government's Independent Media Inquiry , are trying to finish off their report to the government. It's due by 28 February. Writing these reports is frequently difficult, but Finkelstein and Rickets...
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http://youtu.be/YQIMGV5vtd4
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http://youtu.be/x7M47ITv8iQ One thing I think about whenever I sit in a tram waiting for cars that shouldn't be holding up the tram to stop holding up the tram is that trams should have a video cam on them and drivers could have a button that either activates the cam or marks...
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[slideshare id=4858111&doc=ourfuturelibrary3-100728100555-phpapp02] Tim O'Reilly proposed the slogan "Government as a platform" for his Government 2.0 activities which he's heavily scaled back in favour of more lucrative opportunities. But there was always a problem. That prob...
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When I did the Government 2.0 Taskforce, one of the subjects that was earnestly discussed was archiving of government sites. It's a big problem in government. I could never see why it should be a big problem. After all you can look at anything written on ClubTroppo since it st...
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Ross Gittins asked me if I'd fill in for him during his summer break, which gives me a chance to get a few things off my chest. So here's the first of four weekly columns. In 2009, I chaired the federal government's Government 2.0 Taskforce. We sketched out how government migh...
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The Effects of Home Computers on Educational Outcomes. Evidence from a Field Experiment with Schoolchildren Date: 2011-09 By: Robert Fairlie (Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Cruz) Jonathan Robinson (Department of Economics, University of California, Sa...
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Here are two talks I've given in the last year. One was a couple of weeks ago at a Melbourne Conversation on Big Data . I talk about the serendipity of big data and the relevance for privacy regulation. And tell a story about Kaggle. I recommend the talk before mine by David M...
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Sometimes the words I type into Google's search box are the words I want to appear in the results. For years now I've been using the '+' operator to ensure that every result includes a particular term. But recently, without warning, it stopped working . Fortunately Google have...
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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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[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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"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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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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Back in 2006 UK rumour-monger Guido Fawkes boasted that the news is no longer defined by big media . Laurie Oakes is afraid he's right. In his 2011 Andrew Olle Media Lecture , Oakes predicts that bloggers will soon be determining what is news. He says that political commentato...
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Here's the David Solomon Lecture I'll be giving at the Brisbane Museum of Modern Art in an hour's time. I Whether or not I can speak with sufficient insight to be worthy of giving the David Solomon lecture, I possess at least one qualification. I have known David for over thir...
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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="220" caption=" Prize-winning nature and wildlife photographer, paleontological impressario, molecular gourmet and Dark Lord of IP trolling: Nathan Myhrvold, Founder of Intellectual Ventures"] [/caption] The Economist blog 'Democracy in...
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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: some...
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Adam Smith recognised that a well-ordered society can never develop "when a sizeable number of its members are miserable and, as a consequence, dangerous", writes Mary Riddell in the Telegraph . She argues that "social democracy, with its safety nets, costly education and heal...
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One of the heroes of ferreting out the routine criminality at the News of the World is the former Grandiosely titled Minister for Transformational Government, Tom Watson who's been on this case longer than just about anyone and a genuine champion of open government with whom I...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsLBuCp23QA&feature=player_embedded
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AirBnb is a great startup which uses the power of the net to facilitate home sharing. When travelling, rather than stay in a hotel, you pay to stay in someone's home - someone who's somewhere else enjoying the scenery in someone else's home. There are optimists and pessimists...
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A while ago I blegged in search of a new smart phone. Well disposed to Android I thought I'd buy Samsung Gallaxy II S which had had rave reviews . Anyway, some people expressed curiosity about how things would end up, but I ended up taking Neerav Bhatt's advice on the thread a...
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I never fully understood Google Health . It seems to be a consumer product, inviting you to input your data and track your health, set health goals and so on. Certainly there could be some benefits in this and in the aggregation of information, but the amount of effort maintai...
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According to this article , Apple is aiming at converting computer users to using Apple's servers to store their files instead of their own computer's hard drive. It would certainly simplify mobile computing and eliminate problems with syncing between hardware platforms so you...
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I wanted to comment on Nicholas Gruen's recent post titled the future of tertiary education , but I didn't have time and there was too much I wanted to say. Hence this post. I agree with most of Nicholas's points (some with qualifications) but there's much more that needs sayi...
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Broadband Internet: An Information Superhighway to Sex Crime? Date: 2011-04 By: Bhuller, Manudeep (Statistics Norway) Havnes, Tarjei (University of Oslo) Leuven, Edwin (CREST (ENSAE)) Mogstad, Magne (Statistics Norway) Does internet use trigger sex crime? We use unique Norwegi...
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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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It's a high res picture if you want to download it and read the detail - which is fascinating.
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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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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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Why do all the spam comments say the same thing? Is it really that hard to think up template comments that I might let through when looking at the detritus our spam checker leaves for me to check. This one is specially silly, but otherwise conforms to the standard formula. I a...
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About to book United Airlines to the United States, I thought I'd let any Troppodillians who don't know of this video, that it exists, and that it's fun (and it lopped around $170 million off UA's market cap according to some factoid crazed journalists). And looking it up, I j...
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So now we have to take it seriously! Well I doubt any study can prove something like that, but there you go. Causation could go in both directions, but either way, we told you so . Public policy, trust and growth: disclosure of government information in Japan. Date: 2010-12-20...
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A while ago Paul Montgomery, whom I didn't know, tweeted that he had wanted to set up a blog of the radical centre. His tweet was about his crestfallen discovery that we beat him to it. Anyway, my handle @nichlasgruen was in this tweet so I saw it and suggested that Paul submi...
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Computers are very clever beasties - at least most of the time. Sadly their matches against each other are deadly dull. The games virtually never have strong strategic lines of thinking - which is the main thing that makes chess absorbing (for me anyway - a battle is waged: a...
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Occasionally a report comes along which should give people a whole new way of looking at a public policy debate. A new report on universal high-speed broadband (UHSB) via fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), titled "Superfast: Is It Really Worth a Subsidy?" , does just that. Written...
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If you regularly copy and paste headlines or paragraphs from newspapers, you'll have run into Tynt Insight . It's the software that inserts the irritating "Read More" URL into your blog posts, emails and documents. As John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes , Insight "is a servi...
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Under the wonderful post title " Copyright Infringement And A Medieval Apple Pie ”, the blogger Jane Smith (not her real name, one would guess) has documented the history of an online copyright infringement. Hardly unusual, you would think, indeed the internet is supposed to b...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfFMIhMEyYY&feature=player_profilepage I was pleased to be asked to speak at the Queensland's Right Information Day. In my speech I wanted to speak a little against the grain. The language used by Web 2.0, Gov 2.0 aficionados has a particular qua...
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From Troppo's guest blogger Neal Lawson (OK I nicked his post and reproduced it here). It is so depressingly inevitable. Obama, like Clinton, Blair and Brown before him, like in Rudd in Australia, like the Swedish social democrats, like every example of centre-left government...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OLP4nbAVA4&feature=player_embedded
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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 th...
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It is a nice thing that when you 'uninstall' a program on Windows, if you want to keep all your information, your profile etc, uninstall uninstalls the program but leaves lots of details about your profile in shape. It is not a nice thing however if you don't want this to happ...
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[caption id="attachment_13115" align="alignright" width="306" caption="Average size of equities trades plummets"] [/caption] A striking graph showing the effect of IT on finance - it's becoming economic to parcel up financial bets into much smaller parcels. From the RBA's Asse...
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A few people have sent me requests to recommend them on Linkedin but I've not really known what to say - recommend to whom? But perhaps the secret source was flattery, which as Disraeli once said should be laid on with a trowel. Whatever it was, I got this overgenerous recomme...
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http://vimeo.com/15978330
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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 a...
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Well well well. I'm a fan - perhaps a bit of an ex-fan of WordWeb . It's a great little dictionary, thesaurus which enables you to highlight any word in any app and by clicking a few keys get a definition of a word and synonyms, antonyms and so on. It's a 'freemium' model of m...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHlN21ebeak
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I'm seriously conflicted by the debate over Labor's National Broadband Network. On one hand, the future of CDU's online Bachelor of Laws programs, whose creation and development I oversee, is heavily dependent on the availability of almost universal truly fast broadband within...
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I put off buying an iPad. It was cheap (good) but I was wary of the iPhone software. I expected some decent clones out in a few months of the Apple's launch but got sick of waiting. It's roughly what I expected. Nice, natty and with some stupid things, like the absence of a US...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SBL6dgBBak
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A while ago, I was rung by Richard Letts of the Music Council of Australia , a kind of peak body of music organisations asking - to my amazement - if I would give the Annual address at their annual conference. Robyn Homes of the National Library of Australia had seen me speak...
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This is a guest post from Julia Thornton an occasional commenter on Troppo. Nicholas Gruen’s Government 2.0 taskforce left us a treasure trove of a report, but when the nerds, hackers and policy wonks had gone home, in amongst the half eaten pizza and empty Coke bottles there...
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Who is this man? And why should you care? He is a Portuguese physicist, Filipe Maia, a PhD student at Janos Hajdu Molecular Biophysics group at Uppsala University and he's designed the best chess rating system the world has ever seen. Who knew he had it in him? Maybe him. Almo...
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http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqrr6Aiaqlk&feature=youtu.be Here's my presentation at the O'Reilly Government 2.0 Summit last week. And a copy edited transcript is below the fold. Good afternoon everyone! I’m going to talk to you about public goods. Informally we all have the...
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. . . quoting us ;) Kaggle has a couple of competitions running right now which are generating their usual stellar results. From Andrew Gelman quoting our blog : The Elo rating system is now in 47th position (team Elo Benchmark on the leaderboard). Team Intuition submitted usi...
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In case you're interested, there are some great election haikus circulating with the hastag above. Here are a few chosen pretty quickly. Feel free to offer your own here, or on Twitter. Labour it campaigns / Five weeks in a leaky boat? / Waterfalls await. All day winter winds/...
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Elo ratings involve a system whereby your 'rating' is a function of who you beat or lose to and their rating. The 'future of the species' business is a reference to the fact that this manoeuvre of bootstrapping meaning from the record has become more important to the world rec...
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A nice story available in this article. HT: Serge Soudoplatoff A tramp passes by a restaurant, but does not enter, as he has too little money. The cook is furious to see a tramp in front of his place, rushes him, starts fighting with him, and eventually asks him for some money...
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Pretty interesting . . . Going Soft: How the Rise of Software Based Innovation Led to the Decline of Japan's IT Industry and the Resurgence of Silicon Valle y by Ashish Arora, Lee G. Branstetter, Matej Drev - #16156 (ITI PR) Abstract: This paper documents a shift in the nature...
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I've just looked at the top four apps on Victoria's AppMyState comp - the winners were announced tonight - and they're marvellous. Really natty, fresh and (it seems well done, though I've not put them through any very rigorous testing.) What's happening here is something a lit...
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This is a quick post, I'd like to make it longer but won't have the time. It's worked up from a comment on a post by Kate Lundy which articulates why e-literacy of various kinds should be part of the national curriculum. Couldn't agree more. But a couple of things occur to me....
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Salman Khan's Khan Academy is an amazing labour of love, if you haven't come across it. Over a thousand video tutorials, each around ten minutes long, on subjects ranging from calculus and statistics, through biology, to modern history. But this is what's really mindboggling:...
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My last post on the UK and the third way began with this sentence. What do you do if you’re a ‘third wayer’ and things don’t seem to be turning out all that flatteringly for your vision? You just keep talking in pretty much the same way, slap a coat of Web 2.0 paint on the vis...
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For some time now I've been arguing that we should do for information what we did for competition in the 1990s - adopt a national information policy in the image of national competition policy. National competition policy was a trawl through our economic institutions presuming...
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Lots of readers of this blog will be regular readers of Tyler Cowen. I'm not, but that's just my taste. He often has interesting things to say and there are just too many such people in the blogosphere so he's not on my feedreader. Anyway, Tyler Cowen is often a good read and...
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Two years ago I posted a bleg asking for tips on buying an ultralight laptop. I ended up getting an ASUS U2e which has not been particularly good. Anyway, it may have been Vista that was the problem but it's a pretty underpowered machine - with a 1.07 Ghz Intel Core-Duo proces...
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Well it's not that beautiful, but then lots of bird's tails are not that beautiful. But make a few simple evolutionary rules and somewhere amazing things happen. Like this website on accommodation in Chester that thinks that if it republishes Paul Frijter's post on engineering...
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As I travel the country preaching the great things about Web 2.0 it's great to see a really interesting Web 2.0 app being launched from sunny Melbourne. Well actually I guess it was launched while its creator was living in Sydney but he's just moved down to Melbourne where he...
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In 1997 I went out and bought a Sharp ultra light laptop. A lovely thing it was too. I still have it. It has a 6 gig hard disc and though that would seriously cramp my style if I were to use it as a main computer now, it would still be a great second machine, but I can't jigge...
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I'm going to try to write some posts about public goods as part of writing something about the new age of public goods. As readers to this blog will know, I've got a bit of a thing about public goods, and most recently argued that Web 2.0 is the product of ' emergent public go...
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Here's yesterday's column in the Financial Review coinciding with the release of the Draft Report of the Government 2.0 Taskforce. The Fin's headline was "Web and open government a way to a better world". The expression Web 2.0 connotes the internet as a platform for collabora...
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[caption id="attachment_9707" align="alignleft" width="484" caption="Pope's Odyssey as it appears on your Kindle"] [/caption] I wrote previously about two of my sub $300 IT purchases. The Livescribe continues to amaze and delight - amazed that it's not simply taken over univer...
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I'm usually a proud technology laggard, letting more intrepid people go ahead of me so they can help me out when I get round to the technology, letting systems get better sorted out and bug-fixed, and letting prices fall before I jump in. But, given how cheap they were - each...
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For economists and other social scientists who read this blog but don't pop over to the Government 2.0 Taskforce website, you should - there's m oney to be made serving the public interest - never a bad thing.
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Cross posted from www.gov2.net.au At a roundtable in Sydney, Miriam Lyons of the Centre for Policy Development (CPD) mentioned the idea of inquiries 2.0. As I said to her at the roundtable, Ive been giving a fair bit of thought to that question myself. Having spent some time o...
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Does anyone else have the problem that their Google reader occasionally just loads up a little more than the Google reader logo and then, while it proudly dispalays a sign against a dull yellow background saying "loading" it does anything but. It just sits there. This has happ...
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Cross Posted from Gov2.net.au . Its a truism that the public sector is risk averse and that thats one of the things holding up the adoption of Web 2.0 approaches and indeed quite a few Web 1.0 approaches. I dont think this is inaccurate, but its also too general a statement to...
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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="399" caption="Dr Gruen insisting that he only appear within photo borders which theme with his tie "] [/caption] Over a month ago I gave a paper at a conference organised by Brian Fitzgerald which I reproduced earlier on Troppo here . T...
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I first learned how to work a computer on an Apple Mac. Marvellous things they were - I've still got my old Apple Mac 128K in my garage. I didn't want to learn on a DOS machine. It looked like the effort might be considerable and for the limited reward of rather clunky word pr...
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I've wondered why it wasn't coming. Maybe it is .
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Troppo's Paul Frijters, too self-effacing to push his work on Troppo, has a new paper on the effect of the internet on quality news content. I discovered it on a newsletter of new papers. Looks interesting, so I'll have to have a closer squiz when I get the time. Is the Intern...
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From UK PC world . A new type of PC which is incorporated into a conventional three-point plug is being released in the UK. The Plug Computer is based on a platform developed by US semiconductor firm, Marvell. The device squeezes a 1.2GHz processor, 512MB of DRAM, 512MB of NAN...
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But then I would say that wouldn't I? Lawrence Lessig quotes an Australian economist explaining why free access to public goods isn't 'socialism', it's 'civil society'. Lessig's piece is below the fold. Et tu, KK? (aka, No, Kevin, this is not "socialism") May 28, 2009 5:57 PM...
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A triffic little service , allowing you to have a peek in 'real time' as we say, at the state of Sydney traffic. Click on one of the bright green diamonds. (Apologies if this is old news and you know all about it).
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I put quite a bit of effort into my two pieces o n Adam Smith in Ross Gittins' column while he was on leave and got quite a lot of positive feedback about them. So when I was asked to talk to an excellent conference organised by the indefatigable Fitzgerald siblings of QUT - P...
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When Ross Gittins asked me to write a couple of columns in his place as he went on leave I agreed and realised shortly afterwards that they would coincide more or less with the 250th anniversary of the publication of The Theory of Moral Sentiments . So I decided I'd try to wri...
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While it's very unedifying when people are stirred up, I enjoy the odd 'meta' discussion, or at least thinking about what the right principles are for discussion in the blogosphere. So I was intrigued to see them eloquently expounded in Crikey today - by virtue of the publicat...
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A column published today in the Age. Its all shoulders to the wheel on the fires. Or is it? On the weekend, Google, the largest internet company in the world and (how can it be?) one of the most agile offered Victoria a helping hand. It was turned away. The Country Fire Author...
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Lateral Economics is conducting a survey of bloggers and other sites that are trying to encourage debate in the oz-blogosphere and more generally. Im afraid I can't tell you the client it's confidential. However Im hoping that anyone who does or has run a blog, or been involve...
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Free riding is the engine of productivity growth. People see something and copy it. Clothes, business methods, recipes. But there are also things that deliberately prevent free riding. Copyright, Patents that kind of thing. Unfortunately we've pursued the metaphor of property...
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Shopping for Christmas? New books from artist and author Kilmeny Niland. Other artworks from the same source - portraits, miniatures, haiga , wildlife, cards. A prolific source of links on every topic under the sun. Australiana , war , the US , queer issues , etc. Peter Klein...
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Here is today's column for the Financial Review. Patently there's a problem As Mark Twain said, It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. Its what you know for sure that just aint so. Our biggest mistakes often come when we're most untroubled by our logic even w...
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Having already explained to Troppodillians some of the terminal shortcomings in Optus's wireless broadband service to me, I'm afraid things have not improved. Several rogue charges turned up on the statement that coincided with my taking out the wireless broadband account to t...
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I'm sick of paying $100 or more every time I crank through two or three thousand pages of printing. Back in the old days, printer drums and toner cartridges were replaced separately. Drums lasted 20,000 pages or more and could be persevered with even if they weren't giving you...
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Since I posted this post on my problems with my wireless broadband, I've received constant emails from around the Tropposphere on how I am going with the problem, begging for a sequel. Well folks, I can report the next exciting episode is that I contacted Optus at the end of m...
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OK Geeks, I have a question for you. Tell me where my reasoning is wrong. Linux is in many respects a superior operating system to Windows, and seems to work perfectly well for people who know what they're doing as a desktop operating system. The runaway success of products li...
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I think I may have spoken too soon in my praise of Optus Wireless Broadband in this recent post - well the absence of a link brings me to my point - broadband shmoardband. My 'broadband' was too slow to allow me to put in a link. I just did a speed test on it and it's about 10...
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Based on the idea that a bleg is a blogged bit of begging, here is a blogged offer - a bloffer. I've just escaped from my Telstra wireless broadband subscription after two expensive years. If anyone wants my modem, just let me know and come round and pick it up. You have to pl...
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I recently bought an ultra-portable computer which seems pretty good. It's an ASUS U2E. The installation of Windows Vista has given me new reasons to hate Microsoft, but I won't go on about that here. (I have uninstalled Office 2007 as 2003 is better and I'm seriously consider...
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The following paragraph is an abstract of the paper "The Effect of Employer Access to Criminal History Data on the Labor Market Outcomes of Ex-Offenders and Non-Offenders" by Keith Finlay Since 1997, states have begun to make criminal history records publicly available over th...
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John Quiggin and Dan Hunter have written a very interesting survey article on Web 2.0 . They characterise the new innovation on the web as the innovation of the amateur. Their choice of word is deliberately provocative, and also rehabilitative. As they note, at least in the wa...
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You've heard of the tragedy of the commons and if not you can look it up here . But as the public commons burgeons on the internet and in the headlong rush of at least a substantial portion of the corporate sector towards open innovation (or more open innovation) there's anoth...
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I was going on about the renewed importance of public goods to the Review Panel on the Innovation System and so they asked me and another economists on the panel to do a bit of a write up for them. For various logistical reasons, the ultimate document was run up by me the nigh...
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Following my outlining of Web 2.0 ideas for the ABC on Counterpoint, innovator and entrepreneur Ralph McKay got in touch with me to tell me of his own efforts to develop online opinion markets. These are interesting because they're not principally prediction markets. They're d...
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I'm reading one of the better Web 2.0 books around instructively and amusingly called Here comes everybody which Peter Gallagher told me today came from Finnigan's Wake. I thought I was terribly clever when I discovered this book on the net within a day or so of it having been...
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Paradox one Over the very time we were clearing away the detritus of the various collectivist institutions we cobbled together under the name of the Australian Settlement, or 'protection all round', while we proceeded with economic reform by deregulating markets to try to opti...
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A fascinating review of Craig Venter's autobiography . Naturally I'm sympathetic to this guy who looks like he values scientific creativity and achievement above other things, and will improvise through the miasma of institutions that exist to further science to get what he's...
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Good on the monthly for putting up videos of various things related to its flagship publication - the monthly mag. But one request. I virtually never look at videos on the computer. I've got too much else to do. So when I go to Ted if I want to listen to something, I'm gratefu...
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I've been in touch with the US vendor of laptops Portableone from whom I purchased a Fujitsu laptop about four years ago. They're a good crew so if you want a laptop, buy it from them and you're likely to save money on the inflated prices here. They don't like the Toshiba's sc...
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I've praised the Asus Eee PC before (though not its peculiar marketing name) as the direction I've been hoping portable computing would take for some time. It seems to have been a success and now they're unbundling their way to success it seems. Three new models are on the way...
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I was staying in an FAQ hotel in Adelaide last week and was asked to pay for WiFi access. Fortunately I'd brought my own wireless broadband connection (which is much more expensive using as it does the mobile telephony infrastructure rather than wires and WiFi) so I didn't hav...
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By Aaron Edlin Here . In the best of all worlds, we would all benefit from the so-called network effects that result from most people using the same software: everyone could easily communicate with each other and teach each other how to use the software efficiently. Unfortunat...
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Yea verily. Just click through to Phylotaxis and have a look around. Remember to move your mouse through the logo when you first arrive at the site and then have a play around inside.
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Joshua Gans draws our attention to Amazon's attempt to create the iPod for text. Kindle . Joshua's quite keen though unimpressed by Kindle's inability to display pdfs. I'm more seriously unimpressed by that, and don't reckon it will be a goer. At $400 US it's expensive . And I...
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Here is a picture of Harrison's Chronometer (a late version), which was so accurate that it effectively solved a huge problem with navigation - enabling sailors to figure out their longitude when thousands of miles from home after many months. No other method had worked. Harri...
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I was discussing a project with a software engineer last week and mentioned Gruen Tenders, which I've bored Troppodillians with previously here and here . He said that I was describing ' Evidence Based Scheduling ' as described by software geek and commentator Joel Spolsky (ob...
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I was listening to the ABC Book Show and Ramona started talking about anti-spam technology - which rather surprised me. She was interviewing Luis von Ahn who created CAPTCHA who had now produced reCAPTCHA. You know those nasty little visual quizes you fill out to prove to some...
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Guest Post by Dan Walsh of Kwoff.com.au. For some time I've straddled two digital worlds. My 'hi geek' dual monitor setup allows me to read my daily dose of Crikey on one screen and the constant stream of tech news from Digg.com on the other. One world is determined by an edit...
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I continue to be amazed at the way the market for computer laptops evolves. Around eight years ago I bought myself a fantastic little Sharp with an external CD drive which meant that since you don't use the CD drive much, you could cart this little beauty round in your briefca...
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Here's a guest post by an Open Source Programmer Con Zymaris You may not be aware of this, but you're probably reading this editorial using a product sourced from perhaps the world's largest monopoly market. A monopoly more profound and more ingrained than any run by a former...
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Microsoft is a remarkable company. When you run the world's biggest internet mail operation, the default option for most high school students, when you're being threatened by companies that make better stuff but don't have your head start, it's not that difficult to respond to...
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Apropos the discussion of a few days ago, Stephen Fry - yes that Stephen Fry - has some interesting observations on his blog about the iPhone. Apple is now doing what we all (well almost all) wish Microsoft would have done, which is to at least make beautiful things from its p...
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My daughter has a dilemma! Should she replace her aging iPod nano with a new generation iPod nano or with an iPod Touch. I'd heard that Apple were producing an iPhone without the phone but I'd not watched the promo until my anxious daughter showed it to me. Watching it you can...
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Well you've seen me grizzle about Microsoft before now, and in particular Office 2007 including a debate with Joshua Gans on the subject . Well I've now taken the extra-ordinary step of uninstalling Word 2007. It was better than Word 2003 in lots of small ways, but the ribbon...
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This webpage surveys the various products on offer to rip (a groovy word meaning 'record' I guess) streaming video and audio into files like MP3 files. I'm not too interested in video, but occasionally want to convert a streaming audio into an MP3 file. So in the very likely e...
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From PC Pro: He's already endured five months in prison. But now a Linux user convicted of piracy is facing the ultimate punishment - he's being forced to run Windows. Scott McCausland was the one time administrator of the Elite Torrents, until the FBI shut it down and he was...
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After two years of solid blogging, I reckon Im entitled to a bleg (not that this is a promise to wait another two years before my next one.) My problem? Firefox is giving me hell. At the late stages of Firefox 1, I got a bug in which the program took about ten seconds (during...
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Well I'm a friend of Crikey's Christian Kerr. He wanted to be my friend and I wanted to be his - it's Facebook you know. I guess his email contacts just twigged with mine and all of a sudden we're friends! Another degree of separation - gone! Anyway, we were gonna meet up for...
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Many years ago I took up the Microsoft email client Outlook. It's a good program. At least in theory. It combines a powerful e-mailer with a few gimicks that I don't use and a calendar that I do use. Oddly I don't know any other email clients that offer that integration of cal...
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Below the fold is an example of Telstra making life easy. I don't know if you've ever heard Mike Nichols and Elaine May's great sketch from 1960 but that's what it's been like. I may keep you posted if there is further cause. The initial email was in response to being told tha...
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Here's an early review of the iPhone . I'm not actually a fan of the iPod though it's amazing how large its market share is in a market in which it doesn't have many strong natural monopoly advantages - just 'first mover' advantages. It doesn't record radio so I buy other mach...
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Continuing the occasional series of 'why oh why' here is a Microsoft edition. Way back in 1997 Microsoft put out Outlook 97 which was a pretty natty program. It wasn't an act of genius but it was a good program that integrated a calendar and an email client in a useful package...
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Over the fold, a screenshot of Windows' Vista advanced search interface. What the hell were they thinking? It is a confused and cluttered mess. Unfortunately I am trapped on the Windows platform for the moment due to commercial reasons. The best pairing of hardware and softwar...
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About fifteen, perhaps twenty years ago I was talking to a good friend who is an academic in maths education. He was saying that Casio was interested in getting input into the educational potential of their graphical calculators. I thought there was a real opportunity here. On...
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Well I just cant stop gnawing at the bone. I saw an interesting post on Joshua Gans site on feature creep (Bottom line we want more features when we buy products and fewer when we get them home). Anyway in responding to it in the comments thread I challenged Joshua to a shooto...
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Well I keep promising to explain the neurological foundations of homo dialecticus in Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments but then there keep being things that the previous post requires as a follow up. A couple of posts ago in this series I discussed feedback within the fi...
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An exciting day. Dell is shipping Linux PCs. Here's a write up of Mark Shuttleworth talking about the move. He's a major smoothie if you watch the video . I just love the way he avoids the use of the word 'Microsoft'. He he. I reckon it mightn't be long now before Linux become...
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I may trouble myself to write chapter and verse about why you shouldn't bother upgrading to Office 2007 until the inevitable time (though I suspect those days are dying) when Microsoft manages to trap you into needing it for compatibility purposes. But a picture tells a thousa...
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Joshua Gans is very happy with Office 2007 . I'm much less impressed and was sufficiently worked up to respond at length in his comments which are expanded here. I generally try to stay away from Microsoft Software, but it's not that easy. I was an early fan of Macs when they...
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Am I the only one to have programmed the glossary of my word processor with lots of personally tailored shortcuts? I hardly think so. When I type "cssn" in Microsoft Word, my dictionary says that the word "cssn" doesn't exist. Then the program turns to my glossary and finds th...
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Sun Microsystems is open-sourcing Java under the GPLv2 license . Naturally this made Richard Stallman very happy who was recently quoted as saying: It'll be very good that the Java trap won't exist any more. It will be a thing of the past. I have spent the majority of the last...
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Google is closing down a great experiment called Google Answers in which Google acted as a broker for research assistance. If you've not seen it, you posted a question and offered a fee, and if someone wanted to they responded - for 75% of the fee with Google taking the rest....
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Microsoft are a much maligned company. Their software's got better over the years. And I'm sure this won't happen to everyone, but I just downloaded Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. It took a long time to install as it installed about four other pieces of software. Then it asked...
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Joshua Gans quotes my recent post on broadband and VoIP approvingly which I'm pleased about because he knows a lot more about both the economics and the technology of it than me. He puts the issue pithily. "Households are not the relevant unit for purchasing broadband; neighbo...
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Should you be restructuring your communications? A month or so I decided to bite the bullet and fix my family and (small) business telecommunications. I thought I'd outline what I did here and follow it with some reflections which I'm hoping to research further. Currently they...
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Here's Stephen Mayne from today's Crikey on the ABC and podcasting. The ABC's extraordinary podcasting performance All those ABC critics who attack the national broadcaster for not attracting large audiences are eating plenty of humble pie over its extraordinary performance wh...
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You aim too please. Iintroducing the latest in gaming technology. And who said my subscription to slashdot was a waste of time.
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An obvious and powerful way for closed source shops to compete with open source software is to strategically open source. That is they can release bits of code and ask those people who are prepared to, to contribute code either to the software owners' specs or as they wish. Th...
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Courtesy of Slashdot, a nice bit of culture clash and mutual incomprehension broke out in England when an anti-piracy bureaucrat approached the Mozilla Foundation reporting that someone was making money selling Mozilla software. The representative of Mozilla said that that was...
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Writers should keep it short and get to the point, says Julia Baird. Text messaging shows that the Sesame Street generation and generation Y get this . That's the gist of Julia Baird's latest Good Weekend column -- 'Brief Encounters'. What a pity there was so much space on the...
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Stephen Bounds who helped us our hugely in setting up the new site has a business to run and can't help us in day to day tasks. If anyone has the skill to help us out - in doing things like installing plugins and so on we'd be very grateful if they would let us know. Please em...
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I reported the triumph of Massachusetts mandating open standards for the computer files its government would generate here . Well, for the unititiated, along with various other setbacks for open source software, things seem to be unravelling with various resignations . Microso...
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Compared with a few hundred years ago the world works incredibly, almost miraculously well. But do you think of something really simple that you wonder why it isn't being done? I planned to compile a list of ten really simple things that should be done which were obvious (at l...
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I'm chaperoning my 11 year old daughter to the 2005 Children's World Summit for the Environment in Toyohashi City and Toyota City in Aichi Prefecture in Japan. I could go on here about how irritating the indoctrination of the young with all sorts of ridiculous ideas about the...
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I'm excited. I'm chuffed. I've published plenty of articles in journals and, though I thought some of them were good, and a number had important implications for various things, I've rarely had more than the slightest sign of life in articles once they've been published, unles...
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So I have spent the last three hours trying to get WordPress to work on my server. It works okay, but when I did a dummy run install, it didn't remember who had posted what, and there is a bug in it that means that I can not get comments to work. This is due to something that...
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I've penned - well actually I've pecked - an article on open source software. Its not yet been accepted, so I thought I'd see if anyone wanted to read my draft and offer comments before its too late. I should have thought of this before - but there you are - I didn't. When I f...
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For the last couple of days Jen has been attending a teachers' conference at CDU. Yesterday I attended a session with her to listen to Dale Spender, aging 'digital diva' and former guru of the non-radical feminist movement, spruik about her new hobby horse: information technol...
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A week or so ago I posted and asked about the available options for buying music legally across the Internet. I discovered that the alternatives seem to be quite limited in Australia; there are some pretty good sources, but the biggies like iTunes and Napster don't offer their...
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