If you are a regular reader of my blog (and some of you are) you may have noticed that I haven't been posting as often as in the past. There are reasons.....
First and foremost I started a new job a couple of weeks ago in a small local engineering consulting firm. It has turned out to be a good place to work, very challenging and engaging which is a nice change to my last couple of roles. This new job also brings with it longer hours - which of course means less time available researching discussion topics and less time updating my blog. This is both regrettable and unavoidable.
However, I thought that it might benefit people if I dedicate a few posts on the one topic. I see this serves two purposes: 1. it allows me the time to properly research discussion topics and 2. I believe having "themes" that run over a week or so may be a better way to manage things.
There's a great deal happening out there in the real world and so many things that attract my ire. I am approaching 400 visitors to this blog so at least some people believe I have something interesting to say (even if you may not agree with it).
Stay tuned.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Global Warming
Senator Steve Fielding has made up his mind on global warming - there's not enough evidence that it's real.
Wow what a relief! For a moment I thought we would have to stop digging massive, gargantuan holes in and under the ground to extract more coal. I thought we'd have to stop destroying our natural world. I thought we'd have to stop relying on blood stained oil. I thought we'd have to stop using our cars to drive 500m down the road to buy the bread and milk. I thought I'd have to turn off my lights when I didn't need them.
But thanks Steve, now global warming isn't real I can rest easy at night knowing that a couple of temporary jobs in the country's highest polluting industries are now safe, 'cause CO2 pollution doesn't matter.....yippie! I feel better now.
Wow what a relief! For a moment I thought we would have to stop digging massive, gargantuan holes in and under the ground to extract more coal. I thought we'd have to stop destroying our natural world. I thought we'd have to stop relying on blood stained oil. I thought we'd have to stop using our cars to drive 500m down the road to buy the bread and milk. I thought I'd have to turn off my lights when I didn't need them.
But thanks Steve, now global warming isn't real I can rest easy at night knowing that a couple of temporary jobs in the country's highest polluting industries are now safe, 'cause CO2 pollution doesn't matter.....yippie! I feel better now.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Education - change can't wait
I didn't like school, in fact, I struggled most of the time to take even a passing interest. I never wagged a day in my life out of respect for my parents. What didn't I like? I never felt interested in how things were taught, I always felt like my (young) life could be better spent doing things I enjoyed. I liked science, PE and lunch time - I had some pretty good laughs with my friends.
So what's this post all about? Recently on the 7:30 Report (ABC TV) Kerry O'Brien interviewed Sir Ken Robinson, a leading thinker on education, creativity and innovation. Sir Ken has advised various governments and major global corporations and says that most education systems around the world including Australia’s, are still modelled on the needs of the industrial age. You can find the transcript of the intereview here.
One of the things that strikes a chord with me is when Sir Ken said: "people achieve their best when they firstly tune into their natural aptitudes....they've found this thing that they completely get. But the second thing is that they love it. And if you can find that - a talented and a passion - well that's to say you never work again....our current education systems are simply not designed to help people do that. In fact an awful lot of people go through education and never discover anything they're good at at all." he went on to say.....
"we're all born with tremendous creative confidence and abilities....the culture of standardised testing is a blight on the whole of education....we all think and learn differently....getting the best from kids in schools is about understanding the way they think, as well as what it is they're supposed to be thinking about. And I think that's also why some people get through the whole of their education and don't discover themselves at all."
At the end of year 11 my result in Maths was 36%....a few years later I won a merit-based scholarship to study engineering, I went on to gain a Masters and PhD in Biomedical Engineering. So what? Well, I truely believe my progress was hindered by the education system. Engineering is somewhat mathematics related - I didn't even study physics at school! Yet out of the school system I was able to flourish.
I am deeply concerned that my kids are not going to be able to reach their full potential under the current education system. Kids, these days, don't seem to be allowed to be kids....tutoring, coaching, weekend study camps, test preparation....it doesn't seem to end. Gaining close to 1oo% in an exam when you are 16 years old does not mean you are heading down a road that will enable you to attain a fulfilling professional life. Parents (and kids) are being forced into thinking that you will only succeed if you get perfect scores.
Sir Ken has raised some fantastic points about skewed importance of maths, science and languages "at the expense of music and dance and art and poetry and all the things that the arts teach, and humanities and history, and all of those things which speak to the nature of what it is to be a human being and to be able to make your way in the world." Our government needs to reassess this and allow schools and universities the freedom to foster growth in these areas.
So what's this post all about? Recently on the 7:30 Report (ABC TV) Kerry O'Brien interviewed Sir Ken Robinson, a leading thinker on education, creativity and innovation. Sir Ken has advised various governments and major global corporations and says that most education systems around the world including Australia’s, are still modelled on the needs of the industrial age. You can find the transcript of the intereview here.
One of the things that strikes a chord with me is when Sir Ken said: "people achieve their best when they firstly tune into their natural aptitudes....they've found this thing that they completely get. But the second thing is that they love it. And if you can find that - a talented and a passion - well that's to say you never work again....our current education systems are simply not designed to help people do that. In fact an awful lot of people go through education and never discover anything they're good at at all." he went on to say.....
"we're all born with tremendous creative confidence and abilities....the culture of standardised testing is a blight on the whole of education....we all think and learn differently....getting the best from kids in schools is about understanding the way they think, as well as what it is they're supposed to be thinking about. And I think that's also why some people get through the whole of their education and don't discover themselves at all."
At the end of year 11 my result in Maths was 36%....a few years later I won a merit-based scholarship to study engineering, I went on to gain a Masters and PhD in Biomedical Engineering. So what? Well, I truely believe my progress was hindered by the education system. Engineering is somewhat mathematics related - I didn't even study physics at school! Yet out of the school system I was able to flourish.
I am deeply concerned that my kids are not going to be able to reach their full potential under the current education system. Kids, these days, don't seem to be allowed to be kids....tutoring, coaching, weekend study camps, test preparation....it doesn't seem to end. Gaining close to 1oo% in an exam when you are 16 years old does not mean you are heading down a road that will enable you to attain a fulfilling professional life. Parents (and kids) are being forced into thinking that you will only succeed if you get perfect scores.
Sir Ken has raised some fantastic points about skewed importance of maths, science and languages "at the expense of music and dance and art and poetry and all the things that the arts teach, and humanities and history, and all of those things which speak to the nature of what it is to be a human being and to be able to make your way in the world." Our government needs to reassess this and allow schools and universities the freedom to foster growth in these areas.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
My Political Compass
I recently found a website called "The Political Compass". I took the test to see where my compass was pointing. Read below for the result:
Some famous (infamous) people in the chart directly below. Important to note that the 'social dimension' is important in politics. That's the one that the left-right scale doesn't adequately address. So there's a scale ranging in positions from extreme authoritarian to extreme libertarian.
Both an economic dimension and a social dimension are important factors for a proper political analysis. By adding the social dimension you can show that Stalin was an authoritarian leftist (ie the state is more important than the individual) and that Gandhi, believing in the supreme value of each individual, is a liberal leftist. While the former involves state-imposed arbitary collectivism in the extreme top left, on the extreme bottom left is voluntary collectivism at regional level, with no state involved. Hundreds of such anarchist communities exisited in Spain during the civil war period.On the non-socialist side you can distinguish someone like Milton Friedman, who is anti-state for fiscal rather than social reasons, from Hitler, who wanted to make the state stronger, even if he wiped out half of humanity in the process.
The chart also makes clear that, despite popular perceptions, the opposite of fascism is not communism but anarchism (ie liberal socialism), and that the opposite of communism ( i.e. an entirely state-planned economy) is neo-liberalism (i.e. extreme deregulated economy)
The usual understanding of anarchism as a left wing ideology does not take into account the neo-liberal "anarchism" championed by the likes of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman and America's Libertarian Party, which couples social Darwinian right-wing economics with liberal positions on most social issues. Often their libertarian impulses stop short of opposition to strong law and order positions, and are more economic in substance (ie no taxes) so they are not as extremely libertarian as they are extremely right wing. On the other hand, the classical libertarian collectivism of anarcho-syndicalism ( libertarian socialism) belongs in the bottom left hand corner.
My political compass
Economic Left/Right: -8.12
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.56
I always thought I was like Ghandi! :-)
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Numbers that matter
K Rudd and his media machine will have us think that all is hunky dory in this "lucky" country of ours. After all, our GDP is one of the best in the developed world. The debt we have got ourselves into for the sake of financial "stimulus" is one of the lowest in the developed world - break out the champagne!
When you scratch the surface things aren't all that they seem (are they ever?). As I have mentioned in a previous post on GDP and well-being, there's more to being considered fortunate than to have a growing GDP. Below is a list of figures that is a reality check on our good fortune, or as I see it, a blight on where and how our government chooses to spend our money. All figures are from the OECD website and publically available.
Our population growth is ranked 6th highest (1.44) is the OECD, just one below India (1.52). What's wrong with this you may ask? Well, considering we live in a country that has a love affair with consumption there's everything wrong with this. Unless we can reduce our consumption (not likely) then a high population growth is something to be concerned about.
Our balance of payments (not something talked about by K Rudd Inc.) is -5.59% of GDP in 2009, OECD average is -1.46% compare this with Mexico who has a balance of payments of just -0.76%. Not pretty.
The not-so-clever country; Expenditure on R&D is just 2% of GDP. The OECD average is 2.26%, with Sweden (number 1) spending 3.5% of GDP on R&D. Related to this is the number of Patent Applications (2005). Australia - 1180, Canada - 2586, Netherlands - 3739, Japan - 21,163, USA - 35,657! Yes the USA and Japan have a much higher population but the Netherlands with more than twice the patent applications and a population of just under 17 million (33 million in Canada).
Public Health Expenditure (2006) was 5.9% of GDP. The OECD average is 6.5% and France spends a whopping 8.8% of GDP on Public Health. If the Health of our population is so important why is so little finance allocated to it? Persons of below average income going without needed Health care due to costs (2007) was 32%; compare with UK - 9% and Netherlands - 6%! Now that's a number worth looking into.
Poverty Rate in Australia is 0.12 compared to OECD average of 0.105! The lucky country?
Social Expediture in Australia - 17.1% of GDP; compared to OECD average of 20.5%. Italy spends 25% of its GDP.
Lastly, Australia is the driest continent on earth yet we consume the 3rd highest amount of water per capita (in the OECD). 930 cubic metres of water per person! Compare this to the UK with 61 million people who average 240 cubic metres. We use more water in total than the UK with three times the amount of people (no jokes about bathing habits please).
So, K Rudd with have us believe we are going great guns and yes in some sense we are. But I personally think that where it REALLY counts we are not even in the same league as those we like to compare ourselves with. The time has come for a paradigm shift in thinking about our society and what constitutes progress.
When you scratch the surface things aren't all that they seem (are they ever?). As I have mentioned in a previous post on GDP and well-being, there's more to being considered fortunate than to have a growing GDP. Below is a list of figures that is a reality check on our good fortune, or as I see it, a blight on where and how our government chooses to spend our money. All figures are from the OECD website and publically available.
Our population growth is ranked 6th highest (1.44) is the OECD, just one below India (1.52). What's wrong with this you may ask? Well, considering we live in a country that has a love affair with consumption there's everything wrong with this. Unless we can reduce our consumption (not likely) then a high population growth is something to be concerned about.
Our balance of payments (not something talked about by K Rudd Inc.) is -5.59% of GDP in 2009, OECD average is -1.46% compare this with Mexico who has a balance of payments of just -0.76%. Not pretty.
The not-so-clever country; Expenditure on R&D is just 2% of GDP. The OECD average is 2.26%, with Sweden (number 1) spending 3.5% of GDP on R&D. Related to this is the number of Patent Applications (2005). Australia - 1180, Canada - 2586, Netherlands - 3739, Japan - 21,163, USA - 35,657! Yes the USA and Japan have a much higher population but the Netherlands with more than twice the patent applications and a population of just under 17 million (33 million in Canada).
Public Health Expenditure (2006) was 5.9% of GDP. The OECD average is 6.5% and France spends a whopping 8.8% of GDP on Public Health. If the Health of our population is so important why is so little finance allocated to it? Persons of below average income going without needed Health care due to costs (2007) was 32%; compare with UK - 9% and Netherlands - 6%! Now that's a number worth looking into.
Poverty Rate in Australia is 0.12 compared to OECD average of 0.105! The lucky country?
Social Expediture in Australia - 17.1% of GDP; compared to OECD average of 20.5%. Italy spends 25% of its GDP.
Lastly, Australia is the driest continent on earth yet we consume the 3rd highest amount of water per capita (in the OECD). 930 cubic metres of water per person! Compare this to the UK with 61 million people who average 240 cubic metres. We use more water in total than the UK with three times the amount of people (no jokes about bathing habits please).
So, K Rudd with have us believe we are going great guns and yes in some sense we are. But I personally think that where it REALLY counts we are not even in the same league as those we like to compare ourselves with. The time has come for a paradigm shift in thinking about our society and what constitutes progress.
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