Club Troppo

I remember a long long time ago - in fact it was nearly fifty years ago I went with my family on a three week trip to Alice Springs and the Northern Territory. Dad didn't spend much time with us as he was working while Mum, David and I tried to enjoy ourselves. Mum located a r...

Continue reading →

Wendy_Bacon Talk about clamping down on Pub Servants' social media reminds me of how as journos we used to interview them before access to info stopped 10/04/2014 10:09 am This tweet reminds me of something I've pondered for some time. The modern craze for making the implicit...

Continue reading →

Australia's Artists Resale Royalty (ARR ) scheme has so far cost taxpayers $2.2 million in direct support. And over many years the publicly funded lobbyists for this scheme, headed up by the National Association for the Visual Arts Ltd, have additionally spent a lot of public...

Continue reading →

https://vimeo.com/90297488 (For the full 27 minute video from which this 6 minute video has been extracted, click here .) Family by Family about which you've heard before is spreading its wings. We've started in Mt Druitt where we've scoped the program investigating how it sho...

Continue reading →

Book Translations as Idea Flows: The Effects of the Collapse of Communism on the Diffusion of Knowledge by Ran Abramitzky, Isabelle Sin Abstract: We use book translations as a new measure of international idea flows and study the effects of Communism's collapse in Eastern Euro...

Continue reading →

Jan Libich recently interviewed Bruce Chapman , who was one of the main architects of the HECS scheme via which university places are financed in Australia, a system that is being copied all around the world now, making Bruce Australia's most influential international economis...

Continue reading →

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=SK5UUDYaK7g

Continue reading →

An experiment in occasional linkage to insights that might outlast the daily news cycle. If you find any of it interesting, let us know in the comments. Prepare for the knowledge automation transition to take decades (ABC Radio National Future Tense) – How long might it take f...

Continue reading →

Troppo author and frequent commenter John Walker asks: Ken The Bolt case was just one case- is there much information about how 18C has been applied, on a wider scale. Its pretty hard to judge whether there is a problem needing changes to the law , or not, on the basis of just...

Continue reading →

Lamest April Fools' Day joke so far today . There must be better efforts out there. Just post 'em as you find 'em. Please. I could use a bit of ROFLMAO today. Update (9:41 EDST) : I wish I'd taken a screen shot. The current version of the linked post seems to me to have had so...

Continue reading →

From the soon to be published "PISA 2012 Results: Creative Problem Solving", OECD

Continue reading →

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Yo5cKRmJaf0 I have almost certainly fulminated in various asides against TED talks on this blog, and even one full on cri de coeur against retail profundification . (I promised one on business class profundification but I...

Continue reading →

Much of the time, the public can make up its own mind on public events once it get a decent helping of facts; the theatre commentary from the parliamentary press gallery – a little of which I used to write – is more entertainment than vital input. But on the running of the par...

Continue reading →

Here are the top picks from the German Film Festival in Melbourne, with the full schedule below. The Phantom|Das Phantom 06.00pm Friday 28 March @ Palace Cinema Como | 06.15pm Tuesday 8 April @ Palace Cinema Como After the partner of a policeman is killed he is drawn into a my...

Continue reading →

The current inquiry into institutional child abuse holds some interesting lessons about the nature of religion, which I'll stay clear of here. But it also holds a larger lesson about the ability of organisations to act morally and to act properly in the absence of external reg...

Continue reading →

Many people say the best way to influence government is to give policymakers practical solutions to problems they care about. According to this perspective, academics and think tanks scholars can get it wrong by spending too much time analysing problems and their causes. Polic...

Continue reading →

This doco is worth watching for its own sake. (Why are media organisations so dumb and unprepared to allow embedding of their videos - given that the vids themselves come with ads that are hard to avoid - but I digress …) What struck me is how different it would be today. The...

Continue reading →

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ZwFaSpca_3Q

Continue reading →

Suicide and Property Rights in India by Siwan Anderson, Garance Genicot - #19978 (DEV) This paper studies the impact of female property rights on male and female suicide rates in India. Using state level variation in legal changes to women's property rights, we show that bette...

Continue reading →

Pretty interesting paper (pdf). The abstract: We examine how susceptible jobs are to computerisation. To assess this, we begin by implementing a novel methodology to estimate the probability of computerisation for 702 detailed occupations, using a Gaussian process classifier....

Continue reading →