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 …
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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.
The Internet Archive has over 90 employees in the United States, but they reside in 17 different states and even more counties. While distributed workforces are becoming common, it has become so painful to deal with the federal, state, and … Continue reading
BC Liberal leader Andrew Wilkinson today announced a plan to completely eliminate the provincial sales tax (currently 7%) for 1 year, and then cut it by 4 points (or 57%) after that. Conservatives are prone to make expensive tax cut promises during elections, a tendency which contradicts their other touch-stone of perpetually promising to get tough on deficits and debt. [...]
I am currently writing a report for Employment and Social Development Canada looking at the long-term impact of the current recession on homelessness. It should be ready by early November. In the meantime, a teaser blog post I’ve just written on the same topic is available here.
I have read a book review by Steven Pressman in the Journal of Post Keynesian Economics (JPKE). The book he reviewed is “Rethinking the theory of money, credit, and macroeconomics: A new statement for the twenty-first century” by John Smithin. I am sure the book is just as interesting as the book review, but I […]
The Guardian recently featured an article produced by ‘GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator’. It’s an essay intended to reassure us humans that AIs do not want to take over, still less kill all humans. GPT-3 also produced a kind … Continue reading