Tyler Cowen lists his and others follow. So here are mine (in some but not perfect order) and I am treating the word ‘influenced’ seriously. Read more »

The Australian Football League (AFL) begins again this weekend — at last.  Back in the day cricket was a vital part of Australian summer culture.  But now it is so heavily over supplied I only follow it out of the corner of my eye, unless Australia is playing India or South Africa.  As cricket has declined the football off-season has come to seem like an eternity.

One antidote to missing your favourite sport is to read some works of philosophy, because thinking about the great questions of philosophy — what we can know?, how we should live?, how we should be governed? — highlights the utter banality of sport.  So, during the summer I listen to philosophy lectures from The Teaching Company on my ipod, but now football is back so philosophy is put to one side. Read more »

Mark Latham’s opinion piece in the AFR today is highly critical of the www. myschool.edu.au website.  Latham believes that the website is just a flash-in-the-pan which will serve to provide occasional dramatic headlines, but do no long term good in Australian education.

I think he is completely wrong.  The myschool initiative strikes me as being very well executed.  No wonder that Julia Gilliard’s stocks have risen some much in the Government when her execution of the education initiatives is compared to the fiascos of the pink batt installation, the renewable energy credits, ETS design and bargaining, defence procurement, management of the Murray-Darling, etc. Read more »

I recently watched this TED presentation by Microsoft’s Balise Aguera y Arcas on Bing maps. It is amazing. However, what struck me was how ‘Apple like’ Bing’s map feature was relative to Google Maps. Similarly, Microsoft’s Zune OS and new Mobile Windows are far more Apple-like in look and feel than Google’s Android. All of them are engineering marvels but there is a clear strategic difference in the bets Apple-Microsoft and Google are making. Apple & Microsoft clearly think that, whatever gains Google is getting in terms of speed, are less important than look and feel aesthetics for the future. Google is betting that consumers won’t sacrifice speed for anything and want to push as far as possible on that dimension. Right now, I suspect Google’s placement is right given mobile bandwidths. But the question is whether, when the time comes that that is no longer the constraint, which approach will be able to morph into the optimal mix. I have no idea, I was just noting the clear difference and the millions being bet on different assumptions. Read more »

It looks like the NSW Government is worried about credit card surcharges.

EXCESSIVE fees for credit card purchases could be abolished in the wake of an inquiry into exorbitant surcharges.

The charges are often applied by corporations with market dominance, such as airlines and taxi firms.

They were allowed to be introduced by the Reserve Bank in 2003 in an effort to let companies recoup the cost of transactions.

Research has found taxis and airlines are slugging customers up to 10 per cent, with Qantas and Tiger airways last year delivered a “shonky” award by Choice for charging passengers $7.70 each.

Choice said the real cost to the airlines was more like 1 per cent. Read more »