I’ve written a report for the Institute for Research on Public Policy about social assistance—specifically, about social assistance for employable single adults without dependants. A ‘top 10’ overview of the report can be found here.
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Today I shall listen to the news and the football scores and the tally of the dead. Intermittently, I shall pick at the crossword and the biscuit tin, and stare out of my back window at a squirrel as he scurries along my fence. Later, there may be a film to watch. But for now…
By Crikey, it is a warm day here in Broken Hill today. We have the evaporative cooler ducting it’s breeze through the house but it’s still pretty warm. Outside the ground is too hot to walk on and the corrugated iron that encases everything in this town sizzles …
Given the relative absence of higher education from yesterday’s Autumn Statement, I turned my attention to the Department for Education’s 2019/20 annual accounts, which were published earlier this month. Regarding student loans, we have been in something of a hiatus since 2018, when Theresa May announced an review of post-18 funding and commissioned the Augar […]
Running an external surplus requires exporters to export. The right to export more than you import has a price. What does that mean on the other side of the trade?
Last month my laptop became unstable. I had been trying to do something which I began to regret. Losing patience I reinstalled the operating system. Unfortunately on my previous installation I had negligently chosen to set up my hard-drives as a striped array. This meant despite days of recovery attempts …
The Resources you are looking for are in the Unemployment Queue
The long-rumoured report on Australian military atrocities in the Afghanistan war has just been released (and immediately kicked down the road by the national government). I have been thinking about why the Australian military were there in the first place. It's a familiar story: "forward defence", stop-them-over-there, Defend Democracy, our government's need for some violence to scare the voters with, and the same government's habit of doing whatever the American government wants done... But then, why do we have wars anyway?
One of the goals of a new World Wide Web: the Decentralized Web was to help people make money by publishing on the web. There are approaches to this such as Coil, but the vision in the paper has not … Continue reading
This short piece by Tam Hunt in Nautilus asks whether the brain’s electromagnetic fields could be the seat of consciousness. What does that even mean? Let’s start with a sensible answer. It could just mean that electromagnetic effects are an … Continue reading
Looking back from here and now 1980 seems like another world. The Rubik’s Cube was launched, the Voyager 1 probe investigated Janus – a moon of Saturn, Pac-Man was released in video arcades, The Empire Strikes Back was released in theatres, Tom Baker resigned from the role of the Doctor, and Data Extract launched its first issue! “This will be my first and probably last editorial.” Not exactly the words you’d expect to launch a publication that would still be going strong 40 years later, but that’s exactly how editor Dallas Jones chose to launch the first issue of Data… Continue reading
How the central bank setting interest rates above zero forces banks to pay interest on deposits
Another neoliberal throws in the towel in the face of unassailable facts and logic
It seems being a Doctor Who fan makes you a hot commodity. Not only are “nerds” trendy and Geek is the new cool these days but it seems our members are in demand particularly if you are a putting together a television series. In the space of just a few days the Doctor Who Club of Australia received two requests from production companies looking for people to take part in their programs. And they were polar opposites with the first request coming from Endemol Shine – who were casting Beauty and The Beast and just a few days later the… Continue reading
For a Backdrop CMS site I'm currently working on, I needed to create a node programatically (i.e. via some PHP code, as opposed to the UI). Generally when I need to do something in Backdrop, I'll search for similar solutions in Drupal 7 and then migrate them over (Backdrop still has some catching up to do in the 'online help and tutorials' department; hence this blog post).
So I went looking for how to create nodes programatically in Drupal 7, and there were plently of results. The answer is basically to create an object or array of values (your 'node'), then run it through node_save(). Unfortunately each answer had a different idea about exactly what values you should initially assign to your 'node'. Wanting a more bullet-proof solution, I kept looking and finally saw a suggestion someone made to check out the Devel Generate module. It creates nodes programatically, so it has the code to do just this. Since that module already exists in Backdrop, I had a look.
Devel Generate creates nodes by:
All too revealing of how the system works ... how the talented former chief of the FT, capitalism’s house journal, was in thrall to ‘movers and shakers’
Even a brilliant newspaper editor can undersell a good story on the front page. At the start of Lionel Barber’s account of the world from his perspective as editor of the Financial Times between 2005 and 2020, there is an extensive list of dramatis personae, almost all of them male. (“One day,” he writes later, “I will deal with the alpha male problem, but not today.”) The players are broken down into their categories: politics, business and finance, royalty, journalism and diplomacy. The heart sinks – if journalism sits so easily in such a cast list, how can it do its job of comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable?
The Polls are in and the candidates for this year’s Committee are… President: Jon Andersen Vice President: Darran Jordan Treasurer: Brad Harrison Secretary: Roger Reynolds No other nominations were received for any of the positions. Continue reading
A video recording of my 2020 Cunningham Lecture, "Do We Need Intellectuals", is now online, open access, here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ycEQDEFyfo&feature=youtu.be
All welcome!
Can you remember with your leg, and is that part of who you are? An interesting piece by Ben Platts-Mills in Psyche suggests it might be so. This is not Psyche the good old journal that went under in 2010, … Continue reading
Vitamin D personal experiment - update after initial 8 week supplementation
Online DWCA Annual General Meeting Continue reading
As part of my PhD thesis, I did some statistical analysis in which I asked the question: “Do higher social assistance benefit levels lead to higher caseloads?” I have recently updated the data and had it published in a journal. Here’s a short summary of the journal article’s main findings.