Latest Story
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Mixed Results for UN Millenium Goal 2: Achieving Universal Primary Education
joelkatz | April 20, 2009While considerable progress has been made in the rapidly developing emerging markets, other poorer regions aren’t doing so well.
As we hit the midway point to the 2015 deadline for the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), for MDG 2, the results are patchy. While considerable progress has been made in the rapidly developing emerging markets, such as Latin America and Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and East Asia, other poorer regions aren’t doing so well. Sub-Sahara Africa lags far behind other developing countries in its efforts to achieve universal primary education, and South Asia is also seriously off track to meet its target before 2015. Also, there’s a disturbing trend, particularly in Sub-Sahara Africa and India, where boys have much higher enrolment rates than girls.
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UncategorisedBlogger-in-Chief’s Column
editor | April 17, 2009- NATIONAL BROADBAND REFORM: A major hindrance to the effectiveness of government-run public consultations is that most of us often have no idea just how much we actually care until it's too late. A new blog by Sally Rose »»
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Plea from a social pariah
Fiona Marsden | April 16, 2009Just because a girl’s not getting on, it is no reason to go getting on her case about it.
I don’t know about you, but as I get older and (hopefully!) make more discerning life choices, I’m beginning to be defined as much by the things I reject, as the things I embrace.
This is particularly obvious in the ‘social freeze’ I encounter when I opt out of pursuits that many Aussies treat with a near-sacred reverence… such as social drinking. Like many others, I did my share of joyfully mindless drinking in my 20s; knocking back waaaay more than I should have, yet escaping with nothing worse than a half-day hangover and the bragging rights it endowed.
By my mid-30s, things began to change. Having more than one or two drinks produced a rather unpleasant reaction – a heartbeat so fast that I couldn’t get to sleep for hours afterwards.
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Has the Share Market Hit Bottom?
Katrina Wybrow | April 15, 2009A good risk is still a risk, which is why you should consider capital protection.
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A New Model of Finance Regulation
patrickcallioni | April 14, 2009How would The United States of America score under a Financial Markets Risk Index?
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Head in the Clouds about Privacy
Robin McKenzie | April 13, 2009Cloud computing is bringing privacy out of dark corners of cuckoo land and into the daylight where it belongs.
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Filtering out the NBN
Gary Looney | April 12, 2009You would not be alone if agreeing to some extent with many views given on filtering.
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A War on Charity
John.Humphreys | April 8, 2009Proposed new rules will likely lead to a less efficient and effective allocation of philanthropy.
Having launched wars on unemployment, drugs, inflation, whalers, disadvantage, downloads, pokies, doping in sport, bankers salaries, greed, neo-liberalism and most other things… Kevin Rudd is looking to extend his targets to include charity.
Rudd’s war on charity is a strange one. The government’s plan is to over-regulate charitable funds (called "Prescribed Private Funds" or PPFs) and require them to distribute 15% of their assets every year. This will lead many PPFs to close down and it will deter people from setting them up in the first place.
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Connecting Social Innovators
msweeks@cisco.com | April 7, 2009ASIX is creating a network of networks to help Australian social innovators communicate and collaborate.
What do The Big Issue, GAP, Open Universities Australia, NSW Rural Fire Service, and Work Ventures all have in common? They are all examples of social innovation.
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Uncategorised
Open Forum’s new feature
editor | April 4, 2009As part of ongoing site improvements, we now have a Comment Alert System. Update your user profile to receive email notifications when somebody responds to one of your blogs or comments.
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We Can All Fund Quality Journalism
sally.rose | April 4, 2009Buyers beware, lest by the time we’re sick of bingeing on trash the alternatives are scarce.
Are Australian newspapers dying? If so, are they taking quality journalism down with them? Does it matter? Are government subsidies or philanthropy the answer?
Nutritionists draw a food pyramid to illustrate a balanced diet. We all know what our ideal diet should look like. Yet our society has an obesity epidemic because as a mass we swallow too much cheap, convenient, seductively marketed junk. It’s bad for our health and it makes it difficult for smaller producers of quality healthy food to survive.
Our consumption of media is much the same. When we prefer to read about a reality TV star over the results of a parliamentary inquiry, we choose to finance a particular type of media product. Even when we are consuming it for free, we are part of the financial transaction.
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Advocating a Financial Markets Risk Index
patrickcallioni | April 3, 2009We need to adopt a standards based approach to regulating our financial markets.
