The Senate Finance and Public Administration Committee has announced an Inquiry into the Lobbying Code of Conduct, (you can get the code here) with submissions due 2008-06-10. The inquiry is meant to review if… Read more »
The Senate Finance and Public Administration Committee has announced an Inquiry into the Lobbying Code of Conduct, (you can get the code here) with submissions due 2008-06-10. The inquiry is meant to review if… Read more »
Just published (2008-05-15) in Nature (doi:10.1038/453257a) is The Next Big Climate Challenge, which argues that significant funding is needed for climate modellers, indeed so much that climate modelling and the supercomputing grunt it requires, should be considered as international "big science", with projects funded internationally in the same manner (although hopefully more effective) than CERN’s hadron smasher and space telescopes. Read more »
The One Laptop Per Child has set up their Australian Arm, but according to the SMH 2008-05-07:
The Education Minister, Julia Gillard, and the Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, did not respond to calls requesting comment. Read more »
Richard Dawkins in "Enemies of Reason: The Irrational Health Service" perhaps kicked an own-goal if his aim is a rational society as soon and as resilient as possible.
We should be not attacking faith-based treatments, but encouraging people to use them. As an evolutionary biologist, Dawkins should understand the selective advantage this would give those humans who are more rational than others. Read more »
Here are a couple of questions I’d use to fail any year 11 maths student who got them wrong, or even looked horrified when given the questions.
I wonder if anybody else has questions with a similar attititude? Read more »
When Samson cut his hair, his strength left him, or so the story goes. Recently a thread has been resurrected with lots of photos about the relationships between beards and language success. Read more »
The kreatif 2020 tipes ar shone up in the foto of Krud in frunt of a witebord piblushd in The Economist.
Over the fold is a photograph from the 2008-04-24 The Economist article "Green, no queen: Kevin Rudd’s reformist zeal", which has "Teacher Rudd at his whiteboard" Read more »
While the media and politicians talked about moving to a republic as the "big ideas" from the 2020 stream on "The future of Australian governance: open government (including the role of the media), the structure of government and the rights and responsibilities of citizens", my sampling of 30-odd submissions from that stream shows a completely different focus. Read more »
Those who’ve hit one of my most popular posts, a Gilgamesh ultra-short version post might find it interesting that "brand names" started appearing on bottles at the same time. Read more »
Why were there so few New Zealand flags around Australian Anzac Day commemorations? And we talk of "mateship" as a value! Lest we forget, indeed!
I certainly expected a large organization with slick promotional staff and lots of money like the AFL to be able to afford one when I watched the Cats play the Painters and Dockers last night. I’ve certainly noticed Australian flags in coverage of some Anzac services in past years held in NZ. Read more »
I’ve long thought (especially since hearing about treatment of epileptic mice with subcranial peltier refrigerators) that a good lay-person explanation of epilepsy was "it’s like an overclocked computer - it works real fast on some things, but is much more likely to fritz and/or need a reboot". Read more »
Biomed students: there is a cool poster "Innate immunity: sensing and signalling" available via this page at Nature. The preview on that page is merely a subset of the full thing.
Immunology was certainly much easier to study back in the 70s! Read more »
There are no superlatives to describe the extent of the hypocrisy of Rudd and his ilk, and the threat it poses to Australia, indeed to humanity.
Despite Rudd claiming to be worried, very worried, about the extent children are "phobic" or have a "toxic reaction" to maths, science, and other hard disciplines, his contempt for technical types and their disciplines fills the media every day. Read more »
I strongly recommend you look at Andrew Leigh’s recent and very worrying post "Save the Stats" (2008-04-21), talking about cutbacks at the ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics). Read more »
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director, UN Environment Programme, has noticed (approvingly) the 2020 summit in this press release.
Steiner talks about the good job programs like LandCare have already done, and how Australian research and innovation can be a major contributor to food security not only for ourselves, but for the world, and …
VoxEU’s Eight hundred years of financial folly has an excellent set of graphs and discussion from a database with 8 centuries of financial data.
To tickle me further, it quotes from Gibbon (without saying it came from the section praising the Antonines Pius and Aurelius, who had slow economic growth, and furnished little history):
History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. Read more »
Here is a goldmine for anyone wanting to discuss stem cells, needing to sort out the real science from the hype and the religious hysteria.
Nature, THE premier science journal , has just released some useful papers for free online access, available for 6 months. Read more »
FDB wins for this question. Answer over the fold, all questions so far here, all published answers so far here.
Suck
Join, then cut away (4)
Others for you to figure out in this category. Read more »
The first note from Homer Simpson, perhaps (3)
Others for you to figure out in this category. Read more »
Regulars know I’m a huge xkcd fan, but Techno appeals to my inner grumpy old man rather than the usual whimsy.
Here’s a potted summary for the impatient:
I’ll drag out some old Tangerine Dream tonight - probably Logos. Read more »
An editorial in Nature discusses the shocking irresponsibility of the US in not using the data from 3 million veterans in epidemiological studies on exposure to nasties, including Agent Orange, despite urging from the US National Academy of Sciences.
This wealth of data is important to all of us in a world choking on environmental toxins, including those compounds agencies are keen to class as not a problem. Read more »
For those following Jacques Chester’s recent Club Troppo posts (here and here) on our Federal Government’s cluelessness on IT security and privacy issues, I’d point out a new Privacy Commissioner consultation about a code for notifying individuals about privacy breaches. Read more »
It’s Homeopathy Awareness Week, and I wish more people were aware of just how silly is the thinking behind homeopathy.
I’ve often said "Never go to a homeopath with multiple stab wounds". Read more »
Answer to Bawl quietly, jerk. Q03 over the fold.
unionized (or unionised if you prefer).
To those who don’t know the two pronunciations I wrote of: one way has the stress on the first syllable (politics/economics) while the other has the stress on the second (chemistry/physics). Read more »
Are financial markets unstable because of male traders trying to "swing their big d*icks"? An intriguing article at Nature (2008-04-14), finds correlations with ups and downs of traders and changes in testosterone and cortisol levels, similar to "manic" behaviour.
Female traders did not show these dramatic changes. Read more »
Another chunk of my 2020 gabfest submissions, to Topic 5 (Health Strategy). Other submissions and discussion via the 2020 gabfest category filter
A: Supporting an international registry of all pharmaceutical trials
More efficient and efficacious delivery of the most suitable medication is currently prevented worldwide because of poor governance of data relating to the results from clinical trials. Read more »
A vacuum will if it won’t! (4)
Others for you to figure out via this category. I wonder which regulars will figure these out first. I hope you will comment (even if it is just "groan"), but not include the answer (until at least a week after posting) … I’ll trust that you’ve got it! I’ll add the answer in a week or so in a separate post. Read more »
Australia’s tissue donors are a rare breed, and it appears older donors of bone marrow provide less useful tissue. The implications of the ageing list of potential donors implies drives need to be targetted to younger people. More details in Nature’s "Bone Marrow Transplantation" [doi:10.1038/sj.bmt.1705950] here). Read more »
Answer to Bawl quietly, jerk. Q00 over the fold.
mint Read more »
Careful! KLOO! (4,3)
Others for you to figure out via this category. I wonder which regulars will figure these out first. Read more »
I wonder which xkcd posts appeal to readers. (For those who are unaware of xkcd, take a browse.) Does anybody care to nominate between 0 and 5 that appeal? I say appeal, not send you ROTFLOL, as whimsy can be more appealing than hilarity.
Remember xkcd uses alt text quite well for aside comments, so if your browser/reader supports display of alt text when hovering over the image, I recommend it. Read more »
Another chunk of my 2020 gabfest submissions, to Topic 9 (Australian Governance).
I’ll flesh it out with relevant links later, but this is in quick response to Jacques Chester’s Submission Cut/Paste on the same topic on Club Troppo. Independently, we seem to be pretty well aligned! Read more »
This New Scientist newsbite and related papers will get feminists (and antagonists) up and debating, about the nature/nurture debate and toy preferences between girls and boys.
Wallen’s team looked at 11 male and 23 female rhesus monkeys. In general the males preferred to play with wheeled toys, such as dumper trucks, over plush dolls, while female monkeys played with both kinds of toys. Read more »
Andrew Norton strikes again, (I say in the nicest possible way). "Carlton’s lone classical liberal" wrote a great post recently on progressives, conservatives and liberalism, stimulating a series of comments well worth reading, by both self-styled righties and lefties. In particular, I draw approving attention to his own comment (No 19), and am compelled to quote from it: Read more »
I’ve been following the Scientific American series on self-experimenters, but Seth Roberts’ efforts are both long-lived, and address a wide range of issues that affect many people, including weight, acne and sleep disorders. Read more »
Let’s hope (I’m dubious) that citizen interaction plans in Victoria don’t follow the normal Brumby approach of letting people have freedom to speak, but never listen to them. Read more »
Aspartame (marketed as Nutrasweet and Equal) is probably worse for you that sugar, and a new paper extends concerns about carcinogenic action and a dodgy regulatory approval process, now including psychiatric, learning and emotional disorders. Read more »
My post on preparedness for pandemics, including H5N1 (here), mentioned in Club Troppo’s Missing Link 2008-04-02 has an updated set of links, most of which hit my in-tray via my CDC EID alert subscription since I created the post. Read more »
It’s well worth reading the nuanced article "The regulators are coming" (subheaded "Now that investment banking is backed by the state, it needs re-regulating. Carefully") in The Economist 2008-03-27. Read more »
Our politicians fiddle with birth incentives, bringing the Malthusian firestorm ever closer. They refuse to dampen population growth, ignoring the warnings of Malthus and the escape offered by Moore’s Law. Read more »
The Roman Catholic hierarchy, with it’s new list of mortal sins (and the relatively recent abolition of Purgatory), inescapably condemns those who define or obey doctrine to eternal damnation. Read more »
It’s a bumper issue of The Economist (2008-03-22) for pithy comments, with a special supplement on the financial crisis. Buy it. Read more »
They called him "The King". He died, was buried… and yet many people swore they saw Him alive, walking around, coming out of Seven-Elevens and humming "Blue Suede Shoes".
Credulous witnesses.
See Also: Read more »
The Wonkery is up and running (well, crawling, and ugly) on Jacques Chester’s Ozblogistan network.
I hope some of you will join this group blog focussed on upcoming and recently-completed inquiries by Australian governments and agencies, and hopefully having some discussion that will help members, commenters, and lurkers to prepare their own submissions. Read more »
When politicians call for increased teaching of Asian languages (presumably with an emphasis on Chinese), I wonder if they have thought of the difference between written and spoken capabilities.
For one thing, there seem to be genetic differences between populations that use pitch as part of the spoken language (tonal languages, e.g. Mandarin), and those that don’t (non-tonal languages e.g. Proto-Indo-European). Occidental populations thus face significant hurdles to learning spoken Mandarin.
Regular readers will know I’m a big fan of participatory democracy, which is why the ANU Deliberative Democracy Project seems so darn silly.
It proposes merely another forum, the "Citizen’s Parliament" which "will be composed of one person selected from each of Australia?s 150 federal electoral districts, constituting a diversity of citizens reflective of the broader public". Read more »
What can I say? The BusinessPundit has done it again with a brilliant low-fi cartoon slideshow The Sub-Prime Primer. Spot on!
It ain’t flashy, but it is brilliantly accurate.
Hat tip, Zombinol Read more »
It’s hard not to be cynical about the AFL wanting to expand the competition to include two new teams, when there is a perfectly good region that has been loving footy (and supplying many stars back in the VFL days) for over a century that doesn’t have a team: Tasmania. Then there is the Northern Territory (although playing there in the hot weather might be troublesome).
Another Sydney team? One in the Gold Coast? Read more »
It sounds contradictory, but because I am a progressive, I don’t want a "human rights" bill introduced, indeed I think the term "human rights" should be considered politically incorrect, and a "human rights" bill might be a win for regressives.
It’s time the "flexible working conditions" hypocrites (who really mean "screw the worker, I’ll treat them not as people but quickly-replaced production units" ) learnt something from Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge series.
"The New Math of Customer Relationships" (2008-04-21) makes it crystal clear: Read more »
You’d expect the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (or at least his highly-paid spinners) to be net-savvy enough to produce a usable news feed. Think again.
An 8 year old using a freebie blogging service can do better than those who are supposed to be leading us into the future, the expert in innovation and industry! Read more »
Prof Joshua Gans at CoreEconomics blog asks the following: "How do you measure innovation?" (2008-04-26). I’d answer by pointing to Glyn Pritchard at the Australian Bureau of Statistics Innovation and Technology National Statistics Centre (NSC) based in Canberra. Read more »
Hot on the heels of my dummy-spit about the 2020 proposal for HealthBook, I receive notice of a Victorian Auditor-General HealthSMART report, dummy-spitting about the competence of managers, especially shoddy business analysis, for the Victorian government project, which is already two years behind schedule. Read more »
On a day (Anzac Day in Oz and NZ) to contemplate military (mis)adventures and their impact on people, a recent paper about landmines (of all things!) has an "Odd Spot" aspect, and perhaps a slight bit of whimsy.
Mongooses (larger cousins of the ultra-cut meerkats) have been saving people’s lives for centuries by keeping cobras away. Now researchers have got a robot and mongoose working together to locate landmines. Read more »
Secular government good, theocratic government bad.
That’s the usual mantra of progressives, so how come so many self-labelled progressives are currently arguing against a secular government and in favor of a theocracy.
Himalayan exceptionalism?
I’ll admit I’m unhappy about the rate of ethnic change in Tibet with Chinese-sponsored Han migration, just as I’m unhappy about migration of Javanese into West Papua. Read more »
In the US the Democrats will have a woman or black candidate. It’s doubtful one will be the other’s running mate.
The non-white-male thing has energized the Dems, so I wonder what might happen if McCain (Republican) chose Condolezza Rice (both a woman and black) as running mate. Read more »
It’s worth expanding my earlier post on another point from VoXEU’s "Eight hundred years of financial folly" (2008-04-19, Carmen Reinhart). Read more »
Summarizing 2020 in one word: Motherhood. Motherhood statements and motherhood photo opportunities. However, the two best ideas (and from politicians: shock, horror!) could be realized at no cost within a week.
I’m worried! A "Healthbook" (like Facebook, but for health data of individual Australians) is one of the big ideas mentioned in the preliminary 2020 report.
What were they smoking?!? Read more »
Did I miss something from the coverage of the 2020 conference? I saw people with pens and paper. I saw no evidence of an internal wiki (or something similar) being used. It seems they are using 1020 technology to manage the output of our best and brightest.
I hope I’m wrong, and that someone will point out my error. Read more »
It’s good news for those who deserve it, and bad news for those who deserve it.
I’ve thought that you had to be brain-damaged to even consider using botox for cosmetic reasons, as Clostridia (both botulinum and tetanus) were among the nastiest toxins we studied in microbiology. Now evidence is emerging that nerve damage is migrating from the site of botox injections, travelling back UP the nerves.
Join, then cut away (4)
Others for you to figure out in this category. Read more »
Just after posting about a Danish firm leveraging the above-average skills of folk on the autism spectrum, my in-tray gets an announcement for an inquiry in the same ballpark. Read more »
For a good deal, prohibit profit (7).
Others for you to figure out in this category.
From now on, feel free to posit an answer in a comment straight away. Read more »
Answer to this clue over the fold.
Look out
It is an instruction to be careful, as well as “KLOO” being an out/messed-up version of “LOOK”. Read more »
It’s Homeopathy Awareness Week, and I wish more people were aware of just how silly is the thinking behind homeopathy.
I’ve often said "Never go to a homeopath with multiple stab wounds". Read more »
The "skills shortage" is in no small way due to a lack of skill by employers and governments to make best use of the skills and aptitudes of those often sidelined.
Many intelligent people, including those on the autistic spectrum, are "odd", present management challenges, but also present huge opportunities to companies and the nation.
A Danish firm has figured out how to turn such "oddness" into a strength, employing many folk on the autism spectrum in positions where they outshine "normal" people. Read more »
Answer to Bawl quietly, jerk. Q02 over the fold.
P.M. Read more »
