Club Troppo

Looks like a technical detail but what it signifies is of huge consequence - the further development of the division of (intellectual) labour. May Amazon's tail continue to thicken! The Longer Tail: The Changing Shape of Amazon’s Sales Distribution Curve Erik Brynjolfsson Mass...

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Terence Kealey is the Vice-Chancellor at Buckingham University and he will be in Sydney next week for the Mont Pelerin Conference. In 1996 he published a book which has a few controversial ideas in it. I don't recall any talk about it at the time and it was not on my radar whe...

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Well folks. I'm off to the MCG. Again. Who knows who will win but I have a bad feeling. Here are my thoughts. Collingwood is a better side. Much better. To a remarkable extent collingwood forsakes the main weapon of most sides - the lead out from goal, the pass to the lead. Ot...

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A while back I posted wondering what had become of the populist left . The idea was that there are no shortage of seriously angry and pretty extreme right wing pundits. There are some predictably left pundits, but there's nothing that I can think of on the left that matches pe...

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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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Contemplating recent nominations for the Prestigious Critical Rationalist Scholar award. Terence Kealey , Barry Smith , the late Sir Donald Bradman and Ronald Dale Barassi . The criteria for the PCR Scholar are identical to the four that are used for the Rhodes Scholarship, co...

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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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After a year of reading about relative salaries in different sports, salary cap breaches, player unrest and defections in the NSW press, I only just learned that the salary cap in the AFL is $7950000 compared to the NRL's $4100000. This set a little bell off in my head. This m...

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I was a bit disappointed when we were in front and looked like winning by a point - at around the 25 minute mark? Why? Because my son was overseas on a school trip and he would have loved to have been at the Grand Final. So I was hoping St Kilda would have a Barry Breen to kic...

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Well whether they win or not the 'Colliwobbles' come from another time, long, long ago in the late sixties and early seventies when the Collies used to finish first and then not win, either through some bad luck (64, 66, 70) or through peaking a bit early or going into the fin...

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When I hear that anything is 'committed' to something I reach for my gun. It's an almost certain signifier of insincerity. As a donor I receive bumph from the Brotherhood of St Laurence. The latest newsletter I got told me that "The Brotherhood is committed to ensuring that ev...

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Extracting some arguments from the critique of Marxism in the second volume of The Open Society and its Enemies . This is concerned with the Marx/Engels doctrine on the possible need for a violent revolution. Popper argued that the ambiguities of violence and of power-conquest...

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Yesterday in the post I received a copy of CAB: Collaborative Auto Biography , a series of short anecdotes and stories from residents of Cabramatta rendered as comics by Matt Huynh - a project intended in a large part to show stories about the area that don't involve heroin. I...

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Strange things happen when you check the links on your site. Proceeding from a nice statement of classical liberal principles to the Mont Pelerin Society we find The Winners of the 2010 Hayek Essay Contest . And the winner is...Toby Evans of Australia. Whoever he is, you can p...

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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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This is a belated report on a debate on Islam versus Atheism at my campus. It was part of Islamic Awareness Week , orgainsed by the Muslim Students' Association. The official question for debate was 'Should God have a place in the 21st Century?', and the format was pretty stan...

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I was unaware of "doors duty" as recently outlined by Annabel Crabb , but, I can't say I'm surprised. Anyway here's her explanation of what it is. I remember having a conversation last year with a Labor backbencher who had been on "doors duty" during a sitting week. You know t...

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By: Li King King (Strategic Interaction Group, Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena) This paper investigates whether language priming activates different cultural identities and norms associated with the language communicated; bilingual subjects are given Chinese instructio...

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I comments on my previous post on Metrobuses and small improvements in public transport BruceT gave a complaint about waiting and then giving up because of the uncertainty about when one would actually arrive on a weekend when the frequency was lower. This reminded me of the w...

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http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_anderson_how_web_video_powers_global_innovation.html

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