Hugh McKay has a very grumpy rant in the SMH today about the excessiveness of children’s birthday parties. He starts with a description of a two year old’s party, which is more extreme than any two year old’s party I’ve ever been to (I must move in the wrong circles),Continue Reading
In a front page story in the SMH today, the NRMA (NSW’s peak motorist lobby group) accused the government of wasting money on cycle lanes. “The Iemma Government is building a cycleway alongside choked Epping Road, despite as few as 25 cyclists using that corridor each day. At $7.6 millionContinue Reading
Today’s book review is Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, by Philippe Legrain. Legrain is a British journalist (but with a complex heritage involving Estonia, the US and France) who started writing this book just after the July 2005 terrorist attacks on London. The book’s introduction is titled “It’s time for freshContinue Reading
Today’s book review is Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I first came across the concept of Flow in my previous job, where it was presented to us as a concept that will help you manage people better – that you should try and manage people soContinue Reading
There was a story last week about how the new government has issued a directive that major statutory agencies (for example the CSIRO, ANSTO and Questacon) will not issue any “strategic media releases which relate to the Government’s key messages” unless they have been vetted by the government – specifically theContinue Reading
Today’s book review is Strategy and the Fat Smoker; Doing What’s Obvious But Not Easy, by David Maister. First, a disclosure. In a first for me, I got this book as an advance copy for review on my blog. And given that David Maister has been one of my favouriteContinue Reading
Mark Bahnisch in Larvatus Prodeo has a post celebrating the start of the festive season (for political junkies, who had to get the election out of the way before they even noticed that the decorations were up in October). In passing, he comments that: it’s interesting to note, just quietly,Continue Reading
The City of Sydney recently engaged “international urban design expert Jan Gehl” to perform a “public spaces public life” study on Sydney with the aim of reviewing how people use the city of Sydney, living, working, playing, and make some recommendations as to how to improve it. He reported toContinue Reading
The Institute of Actuaries of Australia does a quick (36 seconds is the promise) survey of its members once a month, reported in its imaginatively titled magazine Actuary Australia. Of the 345 respondents (self selected, but a good proportion of all the actuaries in Australia) 35% don’t believe that globalContinue Reading
We had a small party at our place for the election last night. I realised how well I’d chosen the guest list when the people that didn’t know each other started comparing notes on how much they loved Antony Green. This was the preparation I did for the evening: TheContinue Reading