In 2011 I think it was, I presented Kaggle to Tech23 an organisation that held an annual awards and rewards process for the best start-ups. It was a cool thing then and it's great that it's still going. However it runs in in Sydney so I don't get to it all that often. This yea...
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Continued from Part Two . [caption id="attachment_35753" align="alignright" width="440"] If we had an epidemic preparedness index, we could have a league ladder of epidemic preparedness. Then all we'd have to do is get to the top of the ladder and we'd be THE MOST PREPARED IN...
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This is an essay I wrote in 2005 and published in Eureka St which I don't think I've published on Troppo, and since it's my journal of record, I'm now doing so. Throughout last year we commemorated the 125th anniversary of the climax and end game of Ned Kelly’s life, from the...
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Czesław Miłosz is a Polish writer and Nobel Laureate who first came to Western attention in the early 1950s with the publication of The Captive Mind one of the earliest exposes of the nightmare of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe following WWII. He had not been in the Commu...
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Standards: continued from Part One . [caption id="attachment_35719" align="aligncenter" width="270"] Why is this man smiling?[/caption] I. Introduction Why is this man smiling? He's smiling because he is Charles Francis Richter and he came up with the Richter scale. And if you...
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We have a broken process for evaluating costly government investments. The evolving plan for an underground railway through Melbourne's middle suburbs reminds us that we need something better. The Victoria government is currently in the early stages of building what would like...
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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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I The university is one of the finest creations of European culture. Alas, as a troublesome fellow once said, all that is solid melts into air. I’m a bit shy of attributing things to a single cause. These things tend to built up over many, many decades. But certainly what migh...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpKGzulGikQ Reading the publicity for this new book I remembered a name — pathologist Colin Manock — thinking it had been at the centre of some deliberations here some time ago. I was right — it had . I reproduce the relevant column from the arc...
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https://youtu.be/cRhlvHQ0MWY Here's a podcast I did a few weeks ago which has garnered more reaction from people than any I’ve done before. That may just be because (as it turned out) I played cat and mouse with the listener by the podcast talking to an essay I'd written that...
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[caption id="attachment_35644" align="alignleft" width="1163"] For anyone who’s interested I recommend David Cayley’s series of CBC radio documentaries on Illich. (He’s the best broadcaster I’ve come across). The first series of five programs focuses on Illich’s social thought...
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Posted in Philosophy, History, Education, Economics and public policy, Health, Political theory, Innovation, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Democracy, Sortition and citizens’ juries
I've recently completed an essay and like quite a few of my essays, it's not been 'optimised' for publication in a magazine, so I may not try to publish it. But in case any folks here think it's of interest, they need only put their email in comments below or email me and I'll...
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Huge thanks to the long suffering Jacques for all his work on Troppo over the decades. And thanks now to Antonios who's managed to transfer Troppo to a new internet host and massively improve the speed of the site and the functionality of our plugins. Troppo has now officially...
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[video width="640" height="360" mp4="http://clubtroppo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Science-v-inhabiting-our-own-world.mp4"][/video] From a recent podcast interview with Tyson Yunkaporta This post began as a comment on David Walker's post on David Card's Nobel Prize for h...
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One of economics’ most famous papers – the 1994 minimum wage study by David Card and Alan Krueger – has just won David Card (pictured) half of a Nobel Prize in Economics. The overall reasons for Card's award are well explored here and here and here , and by Card himself here ....
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The Nobel Prize for Economics got announced and I was pleased to hear it went to David Card, Josh Angrist, and Guido Imbens. Among the best picks in years, I think. A lot will be written elsewhere about the many things they did, but what I want to honour them for is that I kno...
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[caption id="attachment_35549" align="alignleft" width="700"] Michael Polanyi (L) and Karl Popper (R)[/caption] I've been working on a joint paper with someone else about blockchain. One way the paper might develop would be to argue that the discussion of DAOs (decentralized a...
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Dear Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Iceland (Scandinavia), First off, thank you for the last 18 months. Almost alone in ‘the West’ , you have either avoided covid madness completely (Sweden) or at least regained your sanity more quickly (the rest). You have not deprived...
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Here's a (lightly edited) exchange between me and a friend who, I'm going to assume would prefer to remain nameless. If they want to change this, they will let me know and I will change it. The exchange should be read downwards — with the first email you encounter below being...
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Australia is doing its bit to ensure that there will be a third world war and that it will be a nuclear war. The claim that the U-boats are merely nuclear propelled, not nuclear armed, is a gross deception. One of the key features of nuclear subs is that they can launch and co...
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