Club Troppo

Academic publishing keeps you on the straight and narrow of everyone else's ideas? Who'da thunk? Bias against Novelty in Science: A Cautionary Tale for Users of Bibliometric Indicators by Jian Wang, Reinhilde Veugelers, Paula Stephan - #22180 (LS PR) Abstract: Research which e...

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The Long-term Consequences of Teacher Discretion in Grading of High-stakes Tests by Rebecca Diamond, Petra Persson This paper analyzes the long-term consequences of teacher discretion in grading of high-stakes tests. Evidence is currently lacking, both on which students receiv...

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Following innovations in the UK and New Zealand, some of Australia's more forward looking State governments are looking at two related innovations. The first is 'social investment' with social impact bonds leading the vanguard. Social impact bonds As Wikipedia tells us, a soci...

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Below is a link to my first article on a new alternative economics website - Evonomics - which has only been going fror a short period of time. It's pretty nicely set out and emerged out of the evolution institute . The guy who started it - Robert Kadar - is intellectually gre...

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Though wildly tendentious, this piece by Monbiot is an excellent spray against neoliberalism, a subject with which your correspondent has a vexed relation. I used to describe myself as a neoliberal, but now I'm afraid due to a mixture of distaste at its excesses and the extent...

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Last night I attended the launch of Creative State which was the culmination of over a year of engagement between the Victorian Government and the arts community. It involved a taskforce or some such and an Expert Reference Group - on which I sat. Anyway the Minister was very...

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The starter’s gun has almost been fired on the forthcoming Federal election which will almost certainly now be held on 2 July. However, there is also another Australian election due to take place soon after that: the Northern Territory election due on 27 August under the fixed...

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This post is a follow-up to one I wrote last week (see the latter half of it) and also a response to a more recent post by David Walker . I certainly wouldn’t argue with David’s assertion that a Sydney-Brisbane Very Fast Train route is not likely to be remotely viable even in...

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Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Spanish Affair 2 (Opening Night) Returning from months at sea, Koldo is met by his beloved Merche, who is less than impressed with him after his long absence. With her head held high, she storms away in a huff leaving him with an e...

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For mainstream and social media partisans the current prolonged election campaign is an essential life or death struggle for premiership victory by one's chosen team. But to my way of thinking it doesn't really matter very much which team wins. The two major parties are Tweedl...

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Super-high-speed version: Australia has better things to do with $100 billion than building a high-speed rail line. It's all summed up in this exchange from the ABC TV series Utopia : A new high speed rail proposal is being put to Malcolm Turnbull, and already Rhonda is excite...

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Governments around the world have in recent years destroyed their seized stockpiles of illegal ivor y, egged on by the World Wildlife Federation which believes it sends a signal to gangs that kill Elephants and Rhinos for their tusks. In January, Sri Lanka reportedly crushed 3...

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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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Below the introduction to a piece in The Mandarin today . We shoot the breeze about who’ll win the next election or footy match. Virtually none of it helps predict the future. But we’re driven on … as if somehow it will. We do it with the economy. People ask economists how the...

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From the High Court , 2002 Barrister Geoffrey Johnson: Well, your Honour, if it is of assistance, the practice in the Federal Court…has been to call the applicant by the assigned name. Guadron, J.: The assigned name? Johnson: Well, there is an assigned, I think probably random...

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[caption id="" align="alignright" width="400"] A stupid diagram - the kind of thing we can't get enough of here at ClubTroppo. And remember "Reflect, revise and Improve". That's RRI - capiche?. In short, you can't get enough RRI. In fact you should be doing it now! Reflect, Re...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jo2cP0j5lYk Your correspondent was once very rude about one of Australia's better institutions though now rather complacent - the Reserve Bank - pointing out in 2012 that making it's most important decisions (to set the overnight cash rate) each...

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Last week’s adventure in federalism by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in which he proposed fleetingly that the states be given back their own income taxing power including (after a transitional period) the ability to either raise or lower the tax rates, has attracted various...

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The leak of 11.5 million confidential papers from the Mossack Fonseca consulting firm in Panama promises to be a major source of information on the tax avoiding shenanigan s of the elites. Already, 800 Australians are reportedly under investigation, and dozens of heads of stat...

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As you can see from the above image, the Daily Telegraph revived John Howard's History Wars the other day. Indeed they even disinterred Howard's favourite undead RWNJ historian Keith Windschuttle to lend an air of faux integrity to the whole unedifying clickbait exercise: Wind...

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