[caption id="attachment_26358" align="alignright" width="275"] We can be confident that Tony isn't demonstrating the size of Scott's heart, or his brain for that matter ...[/caption] I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago which inter alia condemned the drastic breach of Australi...

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I don't have a particularly high opinion of Senator Nova Peris. I certainly don't think Prime Minister Julia Gillard should have effectively sacked long-standing and well regarded Senator Trish Crossin to get her into Parliament. Moreover, even if it was reasonable to aim at g...

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Monica Attard reports in The Hoopla on a very recent speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin in which he forcefully puts his country's side of the current conflict with Ukraine. I was especially struck by this observation: The US, [Putin] said, had instigated a “ coup d’eta...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GchWJasxVYY It looks as if prominent and obsessively determined euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke may be in trouble again. He has already had his right to practise medicine suspended and is facing Medical Board disciplinary proceedings ari...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqMCZBjvmD4 In the midst of all the Whitlam nostalgia over the last week or so I couldn't help thinking of the contagious hope and excitement that was generated by the "It's Time" campaign theme in 1972. It still sends tingles down my spine liste...

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Black to play Shabalov vs Aronian 21. ...? See game for solution.

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In the words of Ronald Reagan, here we go again.* Sandy Pentland rehearses something that's made it's way from heresy to platitudinal commonplace with breakneck speed. Asked "what, specifically, is the New Deal on Data?" Sandy tells us this: It’s a rebalancing of the ownership...

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A Tale of Repetition: Lessons from Florida Restaurant Inspections by Ginger Zhe Jin, Jungmin Lee - #20596 (IO) Abstract: We examine the role of repetition in government regulation. Using Florida restaurant inspection data from 2003 to 2010, we find that inspectors new to the i...

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Here is quite a good article seeking to "reframe" the asylum seeker debate. It takes a reasonably moderate, non-hysterical approach. I haven't written on the subject recently myself, because I have been feeling a little conflicted. On the one hand, long-time Troppo readers wil...

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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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Top Picks Little England In the Greek island of Andros during World War II, the lives of its women are dominated by long periods of isolation brought on by the seafaring nature of the island’s economy. Two sisters-the quiet and reticent Orsa and the extroverted Moshca-become e...

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http://vimeo.com/108138933

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The Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) lives in the suburb next to mine and is a Good Thing. It's housed in one of the umpteen magnificent town halls of Melbourne, in this case South Melbourne Town Hall and a lot of its concerts are put on by students, often supplemen...

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If you want to understand what bank regulators were doing in 2008, and what people like APRA and the Reserve Bank worry about here, try reading Matt Levine's latest column . Leviine's piece is nominally about a weird court case involving AIG, the insurance behemoth which almos...

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Source OECD .

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An Englishman enters a naval action with the firm conviction that his duty is to hurt his enemies and help his friends and allies without looking out for directions in the midst of the fight; and while he thus clears his mind of all subsidiary distractions, he rests in confide...

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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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by Alice Chen, Emily Oster, Heidi Williams - #20525 (AG CH HC HE PE) Abstract: The US has a substantial - and poorly understood - infant mortality disadvantage relative to peer countries. We combine comprehensive micro-data on births and infant deaths in the US from 2000 to 20...

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So the Senate will conduct an enquiry into the Queensland government – on the pretext that, to quote Senator Glen Lazarus , it has made "many questionable decisions". Never mind that state governments are elected by the same people who elect senators, or that senators are elec...

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