The legendary economist has died, aged 94.
Categories
I still find it unbelievable that The University of Queensland, one of Australia’s largest universities and a member of the Group of 8, does not appear on Google’s list of universities. Apparently, the way a university gets onto the list is for large numbers of its students and faculty to ask Google to add the university to the list using a web form. After completing the form, it asks you to tell other people from your university to complete the form. Does the absence of UQ from Google’s list reflect an underlying apathy of UQ students and staff towards their university? Surely not. I have blogged on this topic before, but nothing seems to have changed in the meantime. I am hereby starting the campaign to get UQ on Google’s list. UQ students, staff and alumni, do your bit!
Categories
Cairns
We had intended to go to Cairns sometime just before Christmas, but Karen had to present a paper in Cairns on Tuesday so we decided to take our leave a bit early. We headed up to Port Douglas last Friday night straight after work and stayed there for three nights before returning to Cairns for another two nights.
While we were at Port Douglas we took a boat ride out to Low Isles. Absolutely beautiful. Saw heaps of green turtles while we were there. The tour operators, Quicksilver, were first class, and genuinely friendly. They had to deal with a whole bunch of people throwing up on the way out and on the way back. The seas were very choppy and we were in a largish sailing boat. The crew suggested that anyone who tends to get sea sick should take some preventative tablets (which they made freely available). I guess it didn’t work for some people. I don’t imagine that sea-sickness turned many people off their lunch, which was included, because it was mouthwateringly brilliant: prawns, chicken and a variety of salads.
On Sunday we saw the Daintree, Daintree River and Cape Tribulation with Billy Tea Bush Safaris. Again, it was wonderful. We spent a good part of the day cruising around in a big Landcruiser with ten others plus the driver. We saw some smallish saltwater crocodiles on our Daintree River cruise. The smallest was about 20cm long! Our boat driver, Bill Smith, was a real funny bloke, and he had eyes like a hawk. Unfortunately we didn’t spot any cassowaries in the Daintree Rainforest. I went for a swim in Emmagen Creek with some of the other people on our tour. Cape Tribulation was a very idyllic looking place, with its secluded beach and gentle waves.
Monday was spent walking around the town of Port Douglas. We walked up to the lookout for a nice view of the beach. Wouldn’t mind buying one of the houses up there on that hill! On Monday afternoon we caught the bus back to Cairns.
On Tuesday I walked Karen to the Cairns City Council building where she had to give a presentation to various government types. Then I headed off to Kuranda on the Skyrail cableway. The Skyrail was impressive in that it was a fairly long ride with two changeovers in the middle. At each changeover, you can do a five minute bushwalk through the Barron River Gorge rainforest. I had a cable car all to myself for the entire journey. Kuranda itself was pleasant, but extremely touristy. I checked out the markets and went for a couple of bushwalks through the rainforest. The train ride back to Cairns on the Kuranda Scenic Rail afforded some nice views of Barron River Gorge. Karen and I had dinner on the Esplanade.
We spent Wednesday wandering around Cairns. We checked out the main shopping centre. We got back home at around 8pm on Wednesday night. A nice holiday, and Karen’s presentation was very successful.
Categories
Call me slow…
… but I just noticed that Google Scholar has added citation exporting (which, for some reason, it calls importing; guess it depends which way you look at it) to a number of bibliography formats including Bibtex. To enable this feature, go to Google Scholar, then click the Scholar Preferences link next to the search bar. Scroll down to the bottom of the preferences page and you should see the relevant setting that you need to change.
Speaking of Google acquisitions, YouTube has been snapped up by the Web search giant for the not insignificant sum of US$1.65 billion. YouTube was founded in February 2005. Not a bad pay-off for twenty months’ work! Okay, so a lot of the work was probably done before the company was founded, but still…
Anyway, this acquisition comes less than two weeks after Mark Cuban suggested that you’d have to be a moron to buy YouTube because of the litany of lawsuits that are, apparently, just waiting to happen. Material is often posted to YouTube by users who are not the copyright owners.
Categories
More Writely
As I pointed out in my previous post, I have just discovered Writely. Writely also allows you to upload documents in Word, OpenOffice, RTF and other formats, and to export to a variety of formats including Word, OpenOffice and PDF.
Categories
Writely
This post was written using Writely, a web-based word-processing application. As far as web-based WYSIWYG word-processors go, I must say I quite like it. It even supports the direct posting of documents to your blog, as long as your blog software supports an XML-RPC based API (which WordPress and many others do). But blogging is just one use of Writely. You can use it in place of your regular word processor if you so wish. Furthermore, it allows you to collaborate on a document with other Writely users. Writely is free to use. You just need a Google account (Upstartle, the company that developed Writely, was acquired by Google in March this year). I’m sure everybody must already know about Writely and that I’m just very slow. I came across a reference to Writely while reading about Web 2.0 (don’t you just love buzzwords) in case it was relevant to a project proposal I’m helping to put together.
Categories
Gondola Cruise
Last night Karen and I took a gondola cruise up the Nerang River and through some Gold Coast canals. This was part of a wedding gift given to us by my friends. The cruise included dinner, and it lasted about 1.5 hours. It was magical. Instead of giving a detailed account of where the gondola went, what we saw and what we ate, I’m just going to recommend that you go and do it some time, if you haven’t already. Thanks once again to everyone who contributed to this gift; we really loved it!
I spent most of the week down in Canberra, where I attended the Safeguarding Australia Summit with Karen and a few other NICTA people. The summit consisted of a plenary stream, a NICTA stream, and a satellite technology stream. The last day of the summit was taken up by the Research Network for a Secure Australia (RNSA) Conference. A number of good speakers gave keynotes in the plenary sessions. Perhaps the most impressive talk was given by Deputy Assistant Commissioner Peter Clarke of the Metropolitan Police in the United Kingdom. His presentation covered a whole set of operations that the police carried out and are carrying out in relation to recent terrorist activities in the UK. For the most part, the keynote presentations avoided Left/Right political bias, but there were times, during the panel sessions, where political bias quite visibly crept in. One slightly uncomfortable moment arose when, during a panel session on “Homegrown Terrorism”, Ameer Ali, Chairman of the Muslim Community Reference Group, fielded a question from a Zionist lobby group about Hezbollah. However, during the same session, Federal Agent Frank Prendergast of the Australian Federal Police, gave what I thought was a very considered presentation on the role of the AFP in combatting terrorism within Australia, and the relationship of the AFP with the Australian mainstream Muslim community, who, for obvious reasons, are one of the community groups most directly affected by ongoing investigations into terrorism and so on.
The conference was quite different from what I’ve been used to in the past. The plenary stream was very interesting, but the technology streams were more or less a bunch of industry people trying to market their wares.
Categories
Movies and CDs
I’ve seen three movies at the cinema recently. The best of them was Thank You for Smoking, which I saw with Karen. This film was funny and sharp. It follows the story of Nick Naylor, the frontman for Big Tobacco’s lobby group. Somehow, Nick has to convince the world that smoking isn’t such a bad thing, and that the tobacco companies are not evil. At the heart of the film are questions to do with freedom of choice and the role of individual responsibility. These issues were explored via Nick’s relationship with his son, Joey, who comes to respect his father for sticking to his values and for his considerable argumentative skills. This one is definitely worth seeing.
I then saw Fearless, supposedly Jet Li’s last Kung Fu film, with my brother. As far as martial arts films go, it was a pretty good one, though it was in a different vein to recent cinematographic masterpieces such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The House of Flying Daggers and Hero. The action was good, but the plot was rather formulaic, and the attempt to promote harmony in Chinese-American and Chinese-Japanese relations could have been a bit more subtle.
Last night, Karen and I saw Friends With Money. This film was completely character driven, with pretty much no plot to speak of. Character driven films can sometimes be really great, but this was not a great film. It is essentially a snapshot in the lives of three married couples, and one of their single friends. One marriage is on the verge of breakdown; one of the wives is depressed and angry, but really shouldn’t be because she creates expensive designer clothes and has a very loving husband, whose only “fault” in the eyes of some of her friends is to appear a little bit on the gay side of straight; and the other couple seem to have the perfect marriage. As for the single woman, she’s a qualified teacher working as a house maid and flitting from one relationship to another. That’s pretty much the plot, the minimality of which would not ordinarily be a problem, except that the movie didn’t develop any of the characters in this film to a great enough depth.
In the way of CDs, I’ve recently acquired an album called Feeding the Wolves by Josh Pyke. I particularly like Middle of the Hill, Private Education and Fill You In. Before that I picked up Sufjan Stevens’ recent album, Illinois (although, the album cover says Illinoise). That album has a number of gems on it.