News starts now. Two giant leaps for journalism, Monday

Yes, parliament's back, from Tuesday.

From Monday (midnight Monday morning) The Global Mail goes live:

It is non-profit journalism, funded by a patron.

A promising model, and one that takes us back to the earliest days of journalism.

Stephen Crittenden, Ellen Fanning, Mike Bowers, Eric Ellis, Jess Hill, Mike Seccombe are exactly the kind of people you would pick if you were assembling a first-class team. Monica Attard has.

It's at theglobalmail.org from midnight.

And the National Times gets real.

Right now it looks like the opinion and discussion site it was set up as.

But pretty smartly from Monday it'll run breaking national news, - lots of it, writen specially by Fairfax reporters (including Canberra reporters) as it happens. (No wire stories.)

And there will be a live blog, presided over by national treasure Katharine Murphy each day parliament sits.

Bookmark them: The Pulse, nationaltimes.com.au.

Read more >>

Greatest hits. My most clicked-on twelve in 2011

1 Why we need a carbon tax, by the Coalition's environment spokesman March 07, 2011

In 1990 Greg Hunt co-authored a university thesis entitled A Tax to Make the Polluter Pay. His conclusion: "Ultimately it is by harnessing the natural economic forces which drive society that the pollution tax offers us an opportunity to exert greater control over our environment."


2 Lib costings debacle - "auditors" fined December 01, 2011

The two Perth accountants who costed the Coalition’s 2010 election policies breached professional standards and will be fined, a disciplinary tribunal has ruled. The ruling is an embarrassment to the Coalition which claimed during the campaign the costing was “as good as you could get anywhere in the country, including in Treasury."


3 Super is a con, perpetrated by people who con themselves November 16, 2011

Whatever happens in Europe we can take comfort from the knowledge that our money is being handled by professionals - experts who’ll know what to do. They do, don’t they? It’s about to become more important. Wilful blindness by the government and spinelessness by the opposition have ensured the amount of compulsory super we are forced to hand over to money managers will climb from 9 per cent to 12 per cent of our salaries by the end of the decade. Many of us will have to take out larger mortgages than we would have and hold them for longer in order to feed the money management machine.


4 The carbon tax, the mining tax, they'll kill mining right? May 27, 2011

Neither the mining tax nor the prospect of a carbon tax has made a dent in mining expansion plans with the industry reporting plans that would double spending in the year ahead. Capital expenditure plans collated by the Bureau of Statistics show mining companies intend to lift spending from $35 billion in 2009-10 to $51 billion in 2010-11, an increase of 45 per cent. Plans for 2011-12 suggest a further boost of 63 per cent to a record $83 billion, a figure economists say is almost certainly an underestimate.


5 Abbott needs our help. We need to help him. February 09, 2011

Tony Abbott would make an awful CEO. If he put before a board the "budget cuts" he yesterday put before the public it would throw them back in his face. As a means of funding his determination to abandon the flood levy his cuts would increase the budget deficit in 2011-12 and scarcely change the budget outcome in 2012-13. He told the public his cuts were on top of $50 billion of savings and cuts outlined last year. His board might tell him the correct number is $11 billion, outlined to the public on election eve.


6 News Limited doesn't like ads made by millionaires May 30, 2011

If they are about climate change. Michael Caton is seething inside his two bedroom Sydney flat. “I have a gas heater and two fans - that is me,” he told the Herald after reading the pro carbon tax advertisement in which he features rubbished because it also features a multi-millionaire, the more famous actress Cate Blanchett. Like Blanchett, the star of the The Castle and Packed to the Rafters agreed to front the ads for free. They will air for a week as part of campaign that cost a coalition of groups including the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Council of Trades Unions around one million dollars.


7 Budget reality check. Is $150,000 typical? May 12, 2011

Anyone would think the budget had frozen the income limits for getting family tax benefits at $150,000. Talkback radio was alive with calls about it the day after the budget. Was a family income of $150,000 high or typical? Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey thought it was typical. “$150,000 a year for a family is certainly not rich Australia, it is very much middle Australia,” he told the ABC. “Besides I want people to aspire to earn $150,000 or more.” What the budget doesn’t make clear - but should - is that these cut-offs are already frozen.


8 The Economist broadband survey is a disgrace February 10, 2011

On a few grounds. The graph below understates the present target speed by a factor of 10 and is presented as if the size of public expenditure on the project meant something. In terms of value for money it needn't matter whether the company that is building the thing is publicly or privately owned. What matters is that the project is not a dog.


9 Easy listening. Why power prices are really climbing March 09, 2011


10 We think the rich are too rich, but they're even richer August 29, 2011

When it comes to wealth even the richest among us think the rich have too much - but we’ve no idea of how skewed the distribution really is. A new study finds Australians of all incomes believe the richest 20 per cent of us have around 40 per cent of the wealth. We think that’s too high. The survey finds us oblivious to the far more skewed truth that the best-off 20 per cent have 60 per cent of the wealth and the worst-off 20 per cent a mere 1 per cent.


11 You think the summit's over? The good stuff is just beginning October 19, 2011

Wayne Swan may yet go down in history as the father of a monumental change to the tax system. Not merely the far-sighted, poorly-sold and now emaciated mining tax applying to just four of the originally planned twelve or so commodities, but a truly massive change with the potential to set up Australia for decades to come.


12 Abbott. Economists vote. July 13, 2011

Tony Abbott’s already low opinion of economists is about to sink. Asked a week ago why he thought it was that most economists supported a carbon tax or an emissions trading scheme rather than his own “direct action” plan to tackle climate change he replied: “maybe that's a comment on the quality of our economists rather than on the merits of argument”.


Thanx for reading.


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Memo Reserve Bank. Read Twitter, it's underrated

Wednesday column

Tweets are about to take their place alongside other economic indicators as a way influencing the Reserve Bank.

Not Australia’s Reserve Bank, at least not yet. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York is putting up money for firms to provide a “sentiment analysis and social media monitoring solution” that will allow it to read the mood of the economy through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and blogs.

Playing around with a basic free version of the software has convinced me they’re on to something. Before Tuesday’s financial statement tweets about Wayne Swan were twice as negative as they were positive. (I should acknowledge that the machine has a problem with sarcasm. When a Twitter comment thanked Wayne Swan for clearly explaining that ALP policy was no good, the machine scored it as a compliment). After the midday statement the comments become more negative still.

Whether or not the balance of Twitter comments accurately reflects the public mood, changes in the balance of comments probably do reflect changes in the public mood. And the number of comments available is massive.

Australia’s Reserve Bank already makes use of the Melbourne Institute consumer sentiment index, compiled each month by asking just 1200 people how they feel about the economy and their personal finances.

How much better would it be to aggregate in real time one hundred times as many responses, each given freely in moments of frustration or elation where the words used and the frequency with which they are used convey not just the numerical balance of optimists and pessimists but also the intensity of emotions.

Statisticians have a rule, the more observations the better... James Surowiecki takes it to its logical conclusion in his book The Wisdom of Crowds: When the number of observations gets very big and is aggregated it tends to be more accurate than any individual observation, even those of experts.

He says one of the early successes in harnessing the wisdom of crowds came in locating the missing US submarine Scorpion in May 1968. It could have been sunk anywhere in a region 32 kilometres wide.

Instead of asking one or two experts to describe where they thought it was, the chief naval officer assembled a very large group of specialists in all sorts of fields and asked each to guess the location. The prize was a bottle of Scotch.

Aggregating the guesses he came up with a spot just metres from where the submarine was found. It was a location none of the individual experts had come up with.

The outcomes of Twitter sentiment ratings are hard to rig. Right now the ratings for Qantas are running two to one against (about the same as for Wayne Swan before the yesterday’s statement made things worse).

A week ago Qantas attempted to re-engineer the balance by offering a gift pack “including the famous Qantas pajamas” as a prize for tweets that included the hashtag #QantasLuxury and described a good Qantas experience. (“Be creative!”, it added in parentheses.)

The responses were indeed creative, and a good deal more representative of the public mood than the airline had hoped.

“#QantasLuxury is a plane that actually flies,” said one. “#QantasLuxury is chartering a Greyhound bus and arriving at your destination days before your grounded flight,” said another. “#Virginluxury: Getting an exit row, #Tigerluxury: Getting a biscuit, #Qantasluxury: getting a pilot, a plane, engineers and baggage handlers, said one of my favourites.

Some 16,000 tweets followed. An analysis by the social media firm iGo2 found many of them were from the US and Europe where Qantas had stranded passengers.

The airline had created a buzz alright, but it had tapped into rather than altered the balance of feelings.

Southern Cross Austereo boasts on its website it can “connect brands with 95 per cent of Australians”. In the same week Qantas blew itself up on Twitter Southern Cross was humbled when the Australians it connects with used Twitter to connect with it and with its advertisers.

Its Sydney FM radio star Kyle Sandilands had had a less than impressive TV show debut on the Monday night. Angry at reaction the next morning he lashed out at a “fat slag” on a newspaper site who had labelled it a disaster.

“What a fat bitter thing you are. You’ve got a nothing job anyway. You are a piece of shit. Your hair is very nineties, and your blouse. You haven’t got that much titty to be having that low-cut blouse. Watch your mouth or I’ll hunt you down,” and so on.

ABC radio journalist Mark Colvin heard the outburst, tweeted about it, the Mumbrella website copied the audio and posted it on its own site before Southern Cross could remove it and thousands of tweets directly implored sponsors to remove their ads.

One by one Holden, Ford, Lexus, Telstra, American Express, Blackberry, Olympus, Beaurepaires, CUA financial services, Harvey Norman, Coles, Toys R Us and Fantastic Furniture withdrew their ads. Some removed their ads not just from the Kyle Sandilands show but from the entire network.

One advertising agency fired its client after it refused to remove its ads. “We have decided to disassociate ourselves from this client after a disagreement in regards to what we believe to be an appropriate response,” said the Girl PR agency in statement. The client, Goldmark Jewellers, then withdrew its ads anyway.

What is powerful invites manipulation. But the geeks are on that possibility. Fake comments, posted by so-called “sockpuppets” read differently to real ones.

Researchers at Cornell University say they have developed software they say can detect fake hotel reviews 90 per cent of the time. Humans can detect fake reviews only half the time. Apparently fake reviews use more verbs, real ones more punctuation. Amazon is trialing the technology.

Twitter may not be a prefect tool for assessing the mood of the times, but it is shaping up to be better than any we have ever had before. It’s not just the Reserve Bank. Everyone should be taking its pulse.

Published in today's Age






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How to get a pulse on the economy. NY Fed to monitor Twitter.

Tender document below.

Tip for @RBAInfo: Get with it. You are following zero of us. Start.


NY Fed tender document

HT: @JustinWolfers

Read more >>

Carbon Tax. When we Google, we are more interested than concerned.

We might be angry about the carbon tax at Tony Abbott’s public meetings, but on the internet we don’t seem to mind.

Google has taken the unusual step of releasing details of the exact terms used in web searches related to the tax in the days immediately following Julia Gillard’s announcement.

Of the 16 most-asked questions none suggest resentment.

The most popular were: “what is carbon tax,” “what is the carbon tax,” “how will the carbon tax affect me” and “what is the carbon tax and how does it work”.

Of the 17 most-entered search terms not phrased as questions only the least popular, “no carbon tax” suggests anger.

The most popular were the more straightforward “carbon tax,” “carbon tax Australia,” “carbon tax website” and “carbon tax explained.

Displaying on a screen what he said was normally internal Google data the firm’s US-based chief economist Hal Varian told a policy forum in Canberra governments might one day be able to use such information to know instantly the questions the public wanted answered and where their concerns lay.

The search queries paint a picture of a nation hungry for information but far from alarmed.

In the days leading up the Sunday announcement there were very few queries relating to the carbon tax and then an explosion of interest which died away to something like five times the normal number of queries by Wednesday...

The most interest was in the Australian Capital Territory, home of the government and public servants, followed by Tasmania. The least interested Australians lived in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia, devoting half as much web search time per person to the carbon tax.

The forum declared so-called “direct action” approaches to fighting climate change the runner up in the annual Economic Society of Australia Dodgy Awards for the worst use of or most callous disregard for economic research.

Judged by former Competition and Consumer Commission Chairman Alan Fels on the strength of boos and cat calls after a series of presentations, the most dodgy project was declared to be the national broadband network, on account of both the paucity of economic analysis supporting it and its cost.

Published in today's Age


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If this graph doesn't awe you... Meet Google's Hal Varian

Ask Google’s chief economist a question about the future and he goes quiet. “Who knows,” he says when asked whether the share price of high tech companies can keep rising.

But ask Hal Varian about the present and he’ll tell you the possibilities are endless. He’ll be in Australia Monday delivering the keynote address to the annual conference of economists entitled Forecasting the Present.

On the phone from California where he is preparing the board the flight he directs me to a website that allows me to track Australian searches for terms related to flu in close to real time. I can see that so far this year inquiries have been mild, except in South Australia. By contrast in 2007 inquiries about the flu went through the roof.

Exceedingly closely correlated with actual cases of the flu, the web search data comes weeks or months sooner than the official statistics.

In countries where they don’t have as good statistics it is saving lives. Bolivia and Brazil are using Google’s dengue fever data to help direct resources to areas in need as outbreaks strike.

In the United States some economists no longer wait for the official unemployment figures...
“Terms such as - how do I apply for unemployment benefits, how long do they last - it turns out these are highly correlated with actual claims for benefits. We can spot turning points sooner,” says Varian.

In Australia the key word is Centrelink. Searches using that word surged in late 2008 and 2009 during the global financial crisis and - disturbingly - are peaking now, especially in NSW and Queensland.

In Canberra Professor Varian will meet with officials from the Australian Bureau of Statistics to tell them he doesn’t want to replace what they do, merely bring it forward into the present.

“Those agencies have a wealth of well-classified historical data. We can use that to establish correlations and then produce real-time guesses about what’s happening now. Agencies such as yours calculate the rate of inflation collecting prices by hand. We are doing it using barcode and merchant fee data.”

The Google Price Index, one of Varian’s pet projects, is said to closely match the US personal consumer expenditure index excluding food and energy.

“We haven’t seen any divergence yet,” says Varian. But he is fine tuning it before taking it public.

Until recently Varian was a professor of economics at the University of California Berkley specialising in public goods - the sort of things that are produced for the good of society rather than money. For a few years during the 1980s he worked at Melbourne’s Monash University.

When the barely profitable Google asked him to help out in May 2002 he was thrown an embryonic scheme called Ad Auction and told “look at this, it might make us some money”.

Applying the insights of game theorists including John Nash, made famous in the movie the A Beautiful Mind he realised Google had stumbled upon something with the ability to make money for both advertisers and itself. Its key was charging the winning bidder only the price of the bid that came second, allowing bidders to more freely reveal what they thought the ad was worth. He set up a continually moving exchange rate that converts views to clicks and then helped ensure the ads that won were quality ads, because otherwise web users wouldn’t continue to click.

Google now takes in $30 billion a year, the biggest chunk from Ad Auction. “It’s too much to say I’m the man who made Google make money,’ he says. “I just helped.”

His passion is data, and what it can do. A fan of the Issac Asimov Foundation novels in his youth he was taken with the idea of psychohistory, the fictional science of predicting the future based on applying maths to group behaviour. Economists were once frightened of data he says. They need to embrace it along with biologists who look for correlations between DNA and illness, psychologists who look for correlations between brain scans and behaviour.

“We live in a data-rich world,” he says. “The key is distinguishing the data that means something from the data that is noise.”

Asked to chance his arm with a forecast about the future he says the best way to take part is to “become a statistician, it’s the sexy job of the next decade”.

“If you find that hard to believe, think about computer engineers. Who would have guessed a decade ago they would have sexy jobs,” he says.

Published in today's SMH


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The future, as seen in Google search results

At least we're still here.

xkcd asked the questions...

Via Joshua Gans


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The RBA to Tweet. Nerd heaven.

A few days back we got @SwannyDPM

Now we're about to get @RBAInfo

The Bank begins tweeting tomorrow Thursday March 31 (perhaps because April 1 is a bad look).

I am trying to get the team 1000 followers before they start

We are half way there. They are 560 and gaining by the minute!

Grogs suggests aiming for 10,000.

Come on nerds!

Others suggest a book on the first tweet.

Read more >>

Why treat downloaders worse than speeding drivers?

iinet asks the question.

Some quotes from 14-page paper entitled Encouraging Legitimate Use of OnLine Content:

"Authorities regularly equate speeding as a cause of death, injury and major economic loss to the community . In spite of the seriousness of the offence, the graduated penalty structure for speeding never culminates in the total denial of access to transport."

"iiNet does not believe that termination of access for an entire household, or a business, as a result of one individual’s infringement, is ever appropriate or proportional . As with speeding infringements, speed cameras may permit the identification of a vehicle, via its registration plate, but not necessarily the identity of the driver . The owner of the vehicle has the option of accepting a fine, when notified by the appropriate body or, alternatively, can make a declaration to the authorities, identifying the driver for the issue of penalties."

"Infringements can be ranked as minor (say, single instances), major (say multiple instances of different files) or serious (at a commercial level) . Each level having prescribed penalties. Repeat infringements may require further definition – say a minimum period of one week between detections, or examples of sharing multiple files. A scale of fines can be established, relative to the economic loss represented, and demerit points could also be awarded in line with the severity of the infringements."

Here's the full thing:

Encouraging Legitimate Use of OnLine Content

HT: LifeHacker


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Could my job be automated?

Here's a sports report:

"Duke is definitely firing on all cylinders. On December 11th at home, the Blue Devils shelled the Billikens, 84-47. Everything went right from the beginning, and Duke went into the locker room up big, 40-16. The Blue Devils finished strong and that was enough for the big win.

Duke won this game by exploiting Saint Louis in shooting and three pointers.

The Blue Devils out-shot the Billikens and also defended them well, with 53% to their 38%. Duke sealed it with 18 points from three point range compared to only 3 from Saint Louis.

Nolan Smith led all scorers against the Billikens with 22 points on 61% shooting in 31 minutes. Miles Plumlee helped out with 9 huge rebounds.

This win against Saint Louis builds our confidence. Early on in the season, the Blue Devils have a record of 10-0.

When we look to our next game, we see a tenacious team in Elon on December 20th."

Fine, eh?

But as my children would say - it's not real.

It is made by a robot, fed statistics.

It is even fed bias. It writes different versions for the different teams' websites.

Here's the NYT report about such reports.

And here's the SSRN blog noting that the "Holy Grail" of such reporting is financial news.

Should I be worried? ??


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Google does something really good.

Rarely has one single decision done so much good.

From now on when you type in the word "suicide" you get this:

That's right. The Lifeline Australia phone number comes up first. No link, just the number 13 11 14.

Google has done the same with the word "poisoning".



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How did it come to this?

A view from Taiwan:





What the?


Next Media Animation is the largest full-service 3D animation studio in Asia. We provide animation-to-order to some of the biggest entertainment and news providers around the world. Our services are end-to-end, provided all under one roof. From concept to story board to 3D modeling to production, we take your creative ideas and make them a reality. We're also fast. Turnaround times can be measured in HOURS, not days. And we have some of the lowest production costs in the industry. Next Media Animation is a unit of Next Media Limited, Hong Kong's largest publicly listed Chinese-language print media company and publisher of Apple Daily and Next Magazine in Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Read more >>

Don't know how to vote in the Senate?

Go to belowtheline.org.au and work it out.

Then print it out, take it with you, and vote.

And take comfort from the words of my much-missed colleague Andrew Olle.

At the end of each election night telecast he said something like:

"Just remember, whoever you voted for, the sun will still come up tomorrow morning".

Vote well.


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Want to know about the government's Resource Super Profits tax?

Don't try looking on any government websites. References to it have been expunged. Labor loves memory holes as much as the Coalition.

Which is a disgrace as far as Labor is concerned. Labor is in government. Gov.au sites should not airbrush history.

So I'll help out.

Here's the tax you are meant to think never was:

Fact Sheet Resource Profit Tax

Resource Super Profit Tax, Treasury May 2 2010

Remember now?


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You use Facebook?

Try to get out, if you can.

Here's Minister Conroy's extraordinary assessment at Senate estimates:


"Facebook has also shown a complete disregard for users’ privacy recently. Facebook,
I understand, was developed by Harvard University student, Mark Zuckerberg, who
after breaking up with his girlfriend developed a website of all the photos from the Harvard yearbook so that
he and his mates could rank the girls according to their looks — an auspicious start for Facebook. He was
encouraged to develop this further and Facebook, the social networking phenomenon, was born. Facebook has
been rolling out changes to its privacy laws over recent months and as one blogger recently put it:

Facebook has gone rogue. Facebook used to be a place to share photos and thoughts with friends and family, a useful
way to keep in touch. Then Facebook realised it owned the network and decided to turn your profile into your identity
online, figuring rightly that there is money and power in being the place where people define themselves.

These are all quotes from this blog.

In December last year Facebook reneged on its privacy promises and made much of your profile public by default,
including the city you live in, your name, your photo, the names of your friends and the causes you have signed on to.
Then it went further and linked all the things you said you liked to your public profile; your music preferences,
employment information, reading preference, schools—all made public.

Fourteen privacy groups have filed an unfair trade complaint against Facebook with the FTC. Facebook’s
founder, Mark Zuckerberg, says privacy is no longer a social norm. A leaked email from Mr Zuckerberg
recently referred to Facebook users — and I will have to censor this because we are in parliament — as dumb,
and then the next word begins with ‘f’, for giving him all their private information and not expecting him to
use it.

So, what would you prefer, Senator Wortley, a corporate giant who is answerable to no-one and motivated
solely by profit making the rules on the internet, or a democratically elected government with all the checks
and balances in place?"


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Happy birthday Gmail!

Here's how it began, six years ago on April 1, 2004, with what some thought was a joke.

And here's a link to a great audio interview with the bloke who developed it.


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Create your own Batman cartoon - really

Like this...

Here's how

HT: Tim Harford



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So you think "adult" sites are the most popular on the web?

That's what I'd thought.

We're not even close:

The BBC graphic is here, along with a wonderful interactive guide to how the internet works.


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"Balance Your Media Diet"

One of a number of wacky new media graphics:

HT: Nick Gruen


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"I've had a Westpac of a day"

Up on Westpac's tweet site late this afternoon:

A concerned Simon Thomsen tweeted in response: Gail, step away from the window...

HT: Julie Posetti


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