Read. This. Essay.

Print is dying.

Digital is surging.

Everyone is confused.

We're moving!

For the past year, we have been hosted on wordpress; however they charge to use your own domain name. So I've finally taken the plunge and I'm moving the blog to Google App Engine, which is free for low traffic sites like this one.

It will take a few days for all of the old content to be converted to the new platform.

Readily available energy from liquid fuels defines modern society.

And I'm not just talking about being able to hop into your car and drive to Ikea to pick up a new sofa. Arguably the largest effect oil has had on modern society is not its effect on transport, but rather its effect on agriculture. In 1900, American farmers needed an average of about 3 minutes of labour to produce 1kg of wheat, but by 2000, that was down to just 2 seconds. This incredible increase was primarily due to mechanised agricultural machinery, powered by liquid fuels like diesel. That is not to say both private and commercial forms of transport aren't defined by liquid fuel - worldwide 95 per cent of all energy used in transportation comes from liquid fuels.

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For a while now I have wanted to use Amazon's Mechanical Turk to run economics experiments online. "Amazon's Mechanical Turk?" I hear you ask.

Well, allow me to explain. You will of course know of Amazon, the online book, dvd, electronics (in fact, Amazon sells everything!) retailer?

In addition to their primary business as the world's largest online merchandise store (and their other service offerings, for example, a number of very competitive cloud based computing services), Amazon also runs the worlds largest online job market- described as a marketplace for "Human Intelligence Tasks" or HITs.

If you want to make some money in your spare time, you can sign up and complete various tasks, and get paid based on how many you do. For business, it offers a huge labour pool of online workers, ready to complete simple (and indeed more complex) computer-based tasks.

So ideally, I could setup an economics experiment on Mechanical Turk and get 1000 responses for something like $10 or $15!

Great idea, but Mechanical Turk only allows US based companies to purchase labour.

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I finished reading Bauerlein's The Dumbest Generation (Or don't trust anyone under 30) about a month ago but, in part because I really didn't like it and in part because I wanted to examine the evidence Bauerlein uses myself, it has taken me a little while to sit down and write about it.

Bauerlein (an English Professor at Emory University) claims that modern digital technology has distracted children from history, civics, literature and fine art.  Progressing through the book, I became increasingly uncomfortable with Bauerlein's diatribe. My discomfort was not driven by his argument that digital technology is very distracting - I agree that it is, or at least can be - rather, it is that he appears as a complete luddite, in more ways than one.

The book is split into six chapters. Chapter one proves dumping ground for reams of statistics on youth engagement in the arts (history, civics, fine arts, etc) and maths/engineering. Bauerlein paints a picture of youth disengagement and distraction; one of American youth frivolously wasting their lives on trivial popular youth culture and digital engagement with each other:

I don't mean to judge the social deportment, moral outlook, religious beliefs, or overall health of members of the Dumbest Generation. Nor should we question their native intelligence. I'm speaking of intellectual habits and repositories of knowledge, not anything else (Page 33).

The unique failings of the Dumbest Generation don't originate in the classroom, then, which amounts to only one-eleventh of their daily lives. They stem from the home, social, and leisure lives of young Americans, and if changes in their out-of-school habits entail a progressive disengagement from intellectual matters, then we should expect their minds to exhibit some consequences in spite of what goes on in school (Page 38).

His argument is built on a number of measures of intelligence, civic engagement and historical knowledge; chapter two focuses specifically on reading among youth. Bauerlein cites many data sources for his assertion that digital technology is destroying traditional forms of knowledge and learning - one in particular leads him to make the claim that young people are bibliophiles

A 17-point drop among the first group in such a basic and long-standing behavior [reading] isn't just a youth trend. It's an upheaval. ... If all adults in the United States followed the same pattern, literary culture would collapse (Page 46).

Unfortunately, Bauerlein should have thought harder about the statistics he was looking at. In prosecuting his thesis that as technological engagement increases, reading suffers, he makes no attempt to control for other factors that may affect reading rates.

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Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian are both very well know "names" in Economics, so my interest was piqued when I saw they had co-authored a book on the network economy. As usual, Abe obliged and I sat down to read the book.

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I wasn't going to read this, but a friend saw it on my LibraryThing profile, and asked to borrow it. She promptly returned it, and informed me that it was actually a good read. So I had it sitting next to me at work for a few weeks, and every couple of days, while waiting for Stata to do its thing, I read a few pages.

The book is about a hundred columns from the London Financial Times Dear Economist agony aunt column. Overall, some entertaining material - but by the end I was sick of the repetitive formulaic responses...  One column in particular caught my eye:

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A few months ago, Ars Technica had an article on how "Big Content" was creating moral panics in an attempt to change the face of copyright law around the world. Patry's book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars is an examination of the arguments for and against increasingly prohibitive copyright law. Patry's skill is that despite the potential for a mind-numbing legal discussion, Moral Panics is a great read. He eloquently explains the legal, economic and indeed moral reasons why the copyright industries have gone too far. Some might think the book starts a little slow, but by the end, the pace has picked up and its hard to put down.

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I was given this book for Christmas (by request), and I must confess that before reading it, the extent of my knowledge about the Divinyls was their only number 1 hit I touch myself.

I finished the book two days ago, and with it still fresh in my mind, I'm listening (for the first time) to Desperate. Elsie is hypnotising.

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On 15 December 2009 Minister for Broadband (...) Labour Senator Steven Conroy announced new measures '... to improve safety of the internet for families' including 'The introduction of mandatory ISP-level filtering of Refused Classification (RC)–rated content.'

Before we take a look at the current incarnation of this policy, let's start with some history.

In 2004, the ALP had a pretty sensible policy on Internet filtering:

Labor supports policies aimed at educating and empowering parents and citizens with the knowledge and the tools to enable them to protect their children and families from being exposed to inappropriate violent and pornographic material on the internet. Labor therefore supports the development of appropriate internet filtering technology for this purpose. Labor does not support government policies which seek to prohibit Australians from viewing internet content which is legal in other mediums, or which mandates the use of internet filtering technology. [2004 platform and constitution - page 255]

So what went wrong?

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