Club Troppo

Here's a great review essay by Louis Menand on Anne Applebaum’s “Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe”. Below the fold are a few snippets of what were highlights for me, but read the whole thing if you have time - it's full of remarkable facts about the the end of WWII...

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Amid all the praise for the Daniel Craig era of Bond films, it's time for all patriotic Aussies to understand the case for the only home-grown James Bond, George Lazenby. I am not especially a Bond fan, but I've long maintained that his sole Bond film, 1969's On Her Majesty's...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YabrOlqiQng&feature=plcp Though it goes against my contrarian grain, I'm a huge fan of Steve Jobs. (Call it contrarianism squared). This is a relatively new malady which has been produced by watching quite a few videos of him and reading a bit ab...

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http://youtu.be/TxMD02zU9SE Apparently not. In any event, I found this an engaging conversation - even if it's about cult beliefs. I wouldn't have expected it, but I found Mitt Romney arguing for his cult more engaging than most of the rest of Mitt's campaigning. Pity he walke...

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We've spent a long time talking about Australia's relation ship with our near North. The recent Asian Century White Paper succeeds the interminable early 90s debates about whether Australia was part of Asia, which succeeded the end of the White Australia interregnum, which suc...

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There's a beauty to cover songs. The musician, free from obligation to be new, hip commercial or even original, has simply to play homage to the songs that they love. When some people, not big stars, just talented people with some recording gear and the desire to have a crack...

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Click on the player's names to play the game to yourself and find out the solution. White to play F J Sanchez Guirado vs Ponomariov 21. ? See game for solution.

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The very sharp Waleed Aly has joined the debate over whether Catholic child abuse justifies a legal requirement for priests to break the confessional seal . Aly's take: it's an argument with almost no practical consequences, because most priests see excommunication as a far wo...

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Here is a question for you: of the funds going into the university sector via the commonwealth ministries (DEST), how much actually ends up paying for research and teaching versus other uses of the money? Included in research/teaching here would also be the buildings and rooms...

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In physics we're used to the idea that at different scales and at different stages of some process, very different things happen. We inhabit Newton's world of medium sized things and speeds - planets, trees, footballs and travel at walking, driving or flying speed - even space...

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To my astonishment, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney George Pell spent part of a press conference today claiming that the news media are exaggerating the scandal of Catholic Church child abuse in Australia . There was "a persistent press campaign against the Catholic Church's ade...

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Reuters' Counterparties blog assembles Marcos-like numbers for China : "The perception that China is ruled by wise leaders adhering to neo-Confucian ideals has been contradicted by revelations of the massive wealth accumulated by its elite: an estimated $2.7 billion by the fam...

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In his series on Australian macro-economics, Jan Libich this time has talked to Bob Gregory and Michael Knox. Bob was on the RBA board and still interacts extensively with Australian policy land. Michael is in the private sector (RBS Morgans) and as such advises firms on the m...

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Looking at the newspapers you’d think Catholicism is having a hard time with philandering priests and cover-ups of their doings being found out on a weekly basis. Dutch and German newspapers kept track for a while of the regional frequencies of new cases of sexual misconduct a...

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US election-watching is a great spectator sport for many Australian politics-watchers. As Bob Carr says, it's The Greatest Show On Earth. But in the actual real lives of Australians, the dull reality is that US elections generally have big direct effects on just one issue: the...

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I've been talking about this kind of stuff for a fair while in presentations and intimated similar things in some longer pieces and a column or two on Adam Smith and Web 2.0, but I've not done a column on Web 2.0 as public goods privately built. But I have now . THERE'S a revo...

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My daughter alerted me to this very cute video of little kids in the US and their comprehension of the election. "There's the 'white house' and the 'black house'. . . " It's worth watching just for a bit of diversion. But I couldn't embed it so have just copied a still from it...

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I was forwarded a fascinating paper on the optimal number of university administrators written by Martin and Hill who looked at public research universities in the US (the Carnegie I and II universities). The key result that they disclose in their abstract is that "the optimal...

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Both economic pedagogy and broad political discussion are based on what I've come to think of as anorectic understanding of public and private goods - which boils down to the idea that for things to go on well (let's say in an economy) you need a mix of public and private good...

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In part, I talked about how politicians were forced to lie to us because we the population are their bosses and we enjoy flattery. A nice recent example of just that was the announcement that we were going to have 10 universities in the top 100 by 2025. Yeah, sure. We demand o...

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