John Tierney in The New York Times: Read more »

When I penned my thoughts on the stimulus package last year I had this to say:

Stories are also beginning to emerge of micro-wastage. Over-charging by contractors will haunt these projects for so time.

A plumber friend of mine has recently tendered for a number of jobs created via the government school hall scheme. Despite having quoted 3 times his normal price he has won 85 percent of the tenders. However, in each of these tenders he has not included the cost of plumbing required to get to the actual hall. So once his job is complete no water will be able to travel to or from the building unless they engage him to do more work. He believes this will add an additional cost of 100 %.

If all the money is being spent on the halls themselves it is an open question as to who will pay for the water to be actually connected. No doubt, the Commonwealth will try to shift the cost onto the States or even the local school communities. A lot of lamington drives and school fetes are going to be needed to tidy up this mess. Read more »

Daniel R. Hawes in Psychology Today:

...one possibility for analyzing the origin of sex differences in math performance exists in looking at changes in the data over time, and in correlating math achievements with indicators of gender equality in order to see if changes in women's role in society have been followed by improved achievements in mathematics. Read more »

While reading the story of Niall Ferguson’s marriage break-up this leapt out at me.

As a student at Magdalen College, Oxford, he was once so penniless he bought a wedding ring on his credit card and sold it to a pawn shop to raise some cash.

While not encouraging this sort of thing, that is very smart and gets around the punitive rates that banks charge on cash advances.

The other quote that should be emphasised relates the Furguson’s mistress Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

In all the years I have known Ayaan, she’s never had a boyfriend. She’s gorgeous, but with a fatwa, it’s tricky to find guys.

Yes. One would think so.
Update: Jason is onto this already.

The global warming debate has morphed into Mondo Bizzaro.  Rudd is capable of mounting a succinct and persuasive explanation of his emissions trading scheme but chooses not to do so,  preferring to shift the electoral focus to subjects the pollsters tell him are more unequivocally propitious. Read more »

The head of the UN’s climate change panel (the IPCC) Rajendra Pachauri has released a novel that cobines lessons on climate change with sexy story lines.

The protagonist in Pachauri’s book is eerily similar to Pachauri himself: an environmentalist and former engineer who inexplicably has a lot of sex with women (I can’t say whether the last part as any basis in reality). According to The Times the book: “mingles lectures on climate change with descriptions of Sanjay’s sexual encounters, including frequent references to “voluptuous breasts”.

Following last week’s visit from the Skeptic Dark Lord Mockton (who looks and sounds like an evil mastermind from a new climate themed Bond film) I can’t help but wonder if some of the increasing confusion about climate change stems from the eccentric oddballs who we’re told to believe.

Today’s SMH story about Tony Abbott’s parental leave plan is basically old news since Tony Abbott outlined his six month scheme of paid parental leave in his book Battlelines. Abbott suggested it was to be funded by a levy of 0.5 on payroll tax, rather than from general revenue, and presumably this is still his view, since he was critical of the government’s proposal.

I agree with Abbott’s views on some aspects of the current scheme, so maybe his proposals will be a useful goad to improve the present government plans.

Firstly, six months is what most people wanted for paid parental leave and Rudd’s 18 weeks plan was a compromise with future expectations, so perhaps the six extra weeks could be a vote winner for Abbott. Read more »

Lucien Leon lectures in the ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences and made this animation which he calls a "poltoon". It's clear what he thinks of Tony Abbott, but what is he saying about Kevin Rudd. Was that Mahler...

While we’re waiting for Ken’s dissertaion on the ethics of forcing minors to watch this, here are a few comments on the program.

Kevin Rudd and Tony Jones looked like twins, both prematurely white, bespectacled and beaming, standing on either side of the Speaker’s chair in Old Parliament House. Coalition partisans would have been enraged to see the two of them, the Labor PM and the government salaried Labor propagandist, using public money and airtime to propagandise to an assembly of impressionable young minds.

Rudd obviously enjoyed the encounter. You couldn’t say he had the audience eating of the palm of his hand, but the rapport was good. I don’t know how the audience was selected, but see no reason why it wouldn’t have been a representative cross-section of 15-25 year olds, in terms of political background. Rudd clearly sees himself as their kind of guy, and not without justification. Read more »

New light-emitting electrochemical cells could replace OLEDs

Graphene may brighten the future more literally than we had originally anticipated, besides merely revolutionizing electronics and Silicon Valley. Swedish and American researchers have transformed the one-atom-thick carbon material into a new, inexpensive lighting component that could give organic light diodes (OLEDs) a run for their money. Read more »

Looking for open parking spaces in the city is one of the more teeth-grinding rituals for drivers, but researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey may have hit upon a relatively low-cost solution. They combined ultrasonic sensors with GPS to create digital maps of available parking spaces for Web-based navigation systems, according to Technology Review.

As much as 45 percent of traffic in Manhattan comes from cars wearily circling the blocks and looking for parking spaces, according to a New York City transportation advocacy group called Transportation Alternatives. That problem has driven cities such as San Francisco to create "smart parking infrastructure" that detects vehicles in parking spots using fixed sensors -- a solution that costs $500 for installing and maintaining each sensor. Read more »

Read more »

A 2007 hacker attack on an Internet café in Hubei Province in China has led to the discovery and dismantling of an online hacker training camp accused of providing malicious software and lessons in hacker technique to tens of thousands of Chinese users. The site, called Black Hawk Safety Net, has been shut down and three people have been arrested, but as with many stories coming out of the People's Republic these days, it's difficult to tell exactly what's what. Read more »

There’s a lot of it, and it’s all the same tune. Pray that nobody owns the copyright or the modern music industry will collapse.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Comedian Rob Paravonian does the Pachelbel Rant.

He’s following you too…

by Quinn O'Neill Read more »

The Opposition's Greg Hunt spoke to the Rudd Government's third reading of the CARBON POLLUTION REDUCTION SCHEME BILL 2010 on Thursday 4 February 2010:

The ABS lists 8.7 million Australian families. Read more »

Sometimes comic relief is all there is in Question Time and the Nationals MP for Cowper shovels in on with a predictable response from the other side.
The question voters are left with - is the butcher an honest catalyst in this exchange?
I sorta think his use of the term "great big new tax" hints at a a more thhan passing acquaintance with the Coffs Harbour Nats. Read more »

The showbiz maxim about never working with children or animals was on full display tonight as our Prime Minister arrived for a chummy yarn with a nice bunch of kids only to endure a torrid pummeling about broken promises, weak leadership and political expediency.

In a display which put us journalists to shame, a roomful of young adults gave Kevin Rudd one of the toughest grillings of his prime ministership as he agreed to an hour-long solo appearance on the ABC’s Q&A at Old Parliament House, Canberra.

You could see the clutch slipping from the start as the first series of questions directly accused Rudd of being more talk than action. His body language was awkward and what he had probably envisaged as a friendly bit of to-and-fro banter looked as uncomfortable as an all-in press conference - only more so, as the kids were so civilised in their pursuit of the PM that he couldn’t cry foul over unfair treatment.

Much of the fuss over the My School website and league tables is based on a fear that parents will over-react to information that is only a very partial account of a school’s activities. As Pollytics blog reports today, Essential Research has started to explore parental reaction, though with only 242 people in the sample some caution is required.

Question: After seeing the information on your school or your children’s school, do you now have a higher or lower opinion of the school? Read more »