Club Troppo

A nice Project Syndicate column from Brad Delong . This is how it starts. When French politician and moral philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of his Democracy in America in 1835, he did so because he thought his France was in big trouble--and had lots...

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This NYT article highlights something I've long gone on about - the serendipity of information. Dr. Arul Chinnaiyan stared at a printout of gene sequences from a man with cancer , a subject in one of his studies. There, along with the man’s cancer genes, was something unexpect...

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[ This was written on Sunday. An edited version was published at the G8 universities site The Conversation late this afternoon. ] The Northern Territory's Labor government led by Chief Minister Paul Henderson was swept from power at yesterday's election by Terry Mills' Country...

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By October 8 th of this year, the European Finance ministers must decide whether or not to send Greece 11.5 billion Euros in bailout funds, based on the report of the ‘Troika’ (the EU, ECB, and IMF) as to whether Greece is holding up its end of the bailout conditions. If the T...

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I just discovered Tom Keating, an art forger. I was reading a junky $5 book in a book remainders store on famous criminals (as you do) and as I read his story I'm afraid I liked the guy for the way in which his great skills seemed 'genuine' as it were - driven by the love of a...

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I couldn’t resist buying a copy of Daniel Kahneman’s best-seller when returning from holidays. Several friends and colleagues told me it was a great book; it got great reviews; and Kahneman’s journal articles are invariably a good read, so I was curious. Its general message is...

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Some readers may remember this blog post . Here's an update from today's Age/ SMH column. IN 2010 the energetic and forward-looking (then) secretary of Victoria's Education Department invited me to discuss educational innovation and Web 2.0 with senior departmental managers. W...

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By sheer chance, on Sunday I found myself listening on ABC Classic FM to part of the 18th century opera ' The Good-Hearted Curmudgeon '. In her inimitable way, Jen couldn't help suggesting that the opera might have been named after me. Little did I know that within an hour or...

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AKA, "Follow ups no-one asked for". Last year I spent some idle time doing some rough work to see if ethnic and religious populations[1] were more clustered in Sydney than in Melbourne - presumably due to geographical factors. This was done by calculating Gini coefficients and...

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I haven't got time for much of a post, but here's a marker in the sand. There's an interesting conversation going on at Mainly Macro on the Lucas Critique . Amid much discussion about the merits of internal consistency (pretty much everyone thinks it's great. In a messy scienc...

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In a recently published study withTony Beatton (QUT), I looked at how happiness changes by age. For the freely downloadable working paper version, see here. The main findings of the study can be summarised by the graph below, where you can see the way happiness changes over th...

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We are nearing the end of Mario Monti’s first year in office as Italian Prime Minister. As the largest of the Southern European economies experiencing difficulties paying off large public debts, Italy’s fate is crucial for the future of the European Union as a single financial...

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I wrote recently about the prevalence of personal smear tactics by both major parties in the current NT election campaign. It is one of the more repugnant aspects of modern politics, exemplified at federal level by the current Ashby v Slipper shenanigans. Last week the tactics...

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One of Australia's more enterprising journalists, Michael Short asked me to feature 'In The Zone' in the Age a media 'package' he developed and curates for The Age and the SMH. One does a fairly lengthy interview and a short video and then he writes it up for the paper and the...

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A gusty performance by Ecuador, granting asylum to Julian Assange. Assange's claim that he faces further extradition to the US from a disingenuous Sweden, appears to be borne out by the Ecuadorian behind-the-scenes investigations. A simple assurance from the Swedes that furthe...

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I had the pleasure this year of spending part of my holidays in northern Italy. Despite the prolonged recession that you can see the place is currently experiencing, it is still a rich country with good food, great wine, and great scenery. Indeed, there is no real feeling of g...

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http://vimeo.com/28413747

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The 1950s saw Australia's Italian Renaissance which now leaves its traces in the tourist traps of Lygon St. Well they're not too bad, but if you wanted to go to a good Italian Restaurant you'd have to know what you were doing to get a really good one in Lygon St. But things ha...

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[caption id="attachment_21240" align="alignright" width="200"] Socrates Plato Paris Aristotle (it's all Greek to me - sorry couldn't help it)[/caption] Today's report on asylum seeker policy by Prime Minister Gillard's Expert Panel seems so far to have received a more positive...

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