Club Troppo

According to recent media reports an explosion has blown the roof off an unstable reactor north of Tokyo. The reactor is Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station's unit no 1. World Nuclear News reports : Television cameras trained on the plant captured a dramatic explosion surr...

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How did you sleep last night? Thousands of kilometers away in the cities of Japan, people are trapped under rubble crying out for help. According to recent news reports 1000 people may have died in yesterday's earthquake and the tsunami that followed. If 18th century philosoph...

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I haven't had time to put together the usual Missing Link post today. So I'll turn it over to you. If you've read something enlightening, thought provoking, amusing or annoying that you'd like share then go right ahead. The comments thread is open.

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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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See over page for Troppo's exclusive revelations. The other day I discovered a new expression: "click-bait". It was used on ABC Media Watch in connection with a concocted story repeatedly published on News Ltd websites about a German bloke allegedly killed and eaten by his own...

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Teacher Incentives and Student Achievement: Evidence from New York City Public Schools by Roland G. Fryer - #16850 (ED LS) Abstract: Financial incentives for teachers to increase student performance is an increasingly popular education policy around the world. This paper descr...

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Thus reads the first of so far 113 comments on the Qld Police's Facebook page in response to a story in the Courier Mail. John Howard took to talk-back radio to give him a direct line through the compulsive world of spin that is the mass media. Now the Qld Police are showing h...

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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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Ayn Rand's 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged is so popular even Angus & Robertson stock it . And now after years of rumours , it's finally become a movie . That's odd because it's longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace and climaxes with a philosophical speech that runs for 70 pages. Most...

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I'm reading Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants which is quite good. It is a 'book of the article' type of book, but I like it nevertheless. Part Two and some of the chapters at the end are the best part of the book. Copying from the top review on Amazon sets out the basic plo...

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God help the Gillard government with someone like Wayne Swan trying to explain the carbon tax : Mr Swan is now distancing Labor from the term "carbon tax" and accused Opposition Leader Tony Abbott of lying about how it will operate. "What we're talking about here is an interim...

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Business is not happy with Barack Obama - and why should they be? After all they were spoiled by having a real pro in the job before Obama got there. Anyway, Obama has been leaning heavily on all arms of government - fiscal policy (obviously), monetary policy (OK, well via the...

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Dunera Boy Erwin Fabian , about whom I've written at least twice before is at it again - which is to say he has another exhibition on. He's in his mid-nineties now and still working away every day in his North Melbourne studio (which is an old tin shed). I went to the opening...

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In this week's Missing Link Friday: bloggers complain about talkback radio; Andrew Bolt shares a bizarre political fantasy; and, tacked on the end, the usual list of other interesting stuff. Angry radio The whole point of talkback radio is to get the audience emotionally engag...

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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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This post is merely two additions to previous posts, neither of which warranted a post on their own. The first relates to this post from September where I talked about the idea of realtime mapping of bus services using GPS data. Better people than I had the same idea and, thro...

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{This is the original version of an article that appeared from Dec to February in two installments in the Canberra Times} Australia has an official policy, pursued by the Ministry of Finance and Deregulation, on the relationship between government and the web that attempts to...

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How could you compare the health systems of the world in terms of outcomes with plausible verisimilitude, in other words by making assumptions that don't just give you junk? I was sceptical when I read of this index, but think it's a pretty good, though like any such exercise...

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From Three Quarks The perils of writing about Ramanujan, as I did in my last 3QD column , is that there will always be those who insist that a better educated Ramanujan would have been a worse mathematician. One response is to say that by the same token a worse educated Euler...

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