Latest Story
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Spatial Data is Ancient History
Zacha | August 27, 2009It’s a jar full of business cards on the restaurant counter. The question a museum asks you about your postcode. A registration form that’s the hiccough before you can read news on a website. A camera recording the longitude and latitude in the file data as it takes a photo.
“Augmented reality” is an up-and-coming way of viewing location-based information. But most people have been dealing with it non-digitally for a long time. Most people know where the list of postcodes lies – up the back of the White Pages. Most people can read a schematic map well enough to change train lines. Most people are on the voting roll.
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Bees & Trees Must Get Together
Steve Lawrence | August 27, 2009For a number of years now Geoff Mulgan has been talking about bees & trees.
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Where There’s Hope There’s Flourishing Young People
Clive Leach | August 26, 2009Evidence based coaching programmes, underpinned by the principles of positive psychology, should be embraced by policy makers to support youth services.
Just last week, Kate Ellis, Minister for youth, hinted at some early findings of the upcoming “The State of Australia’s Young People Report” indicating that up to 1 in 4 young people suffer from problems relating to mental health.
In the UK earlier this year the Prince’s Trust published a report also highlighting that one in four young people are unhappy; one in ten feel that life is not worth living and that life has no purpose. These shocking figures are significantly worse for ‘hard to reach’ young people not in education, employment or training.
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Geomagnetics not Carbon Cause of Climate Change
Peter Ravenscroft | August 26, 2009There is no scientific evidence whatever, from the real world, that atmospheric carbon dioxide, whether produced by humans or by anything else, is what is warming the planet.
All the satellite maps tracking temperature, carbon dioxide, geomagnetics, gravity, winds and ocean currents, show that the warming of the last four decades, which is very real, is not happening anywhere near where carbon dioxide is being emitted. It is however, happening directly over where the geomagnetic field, down at the boundary between the earth’s core and its mantle, that is, some 2,800 kms below the surface, is changing most, which is also where the earth’s gravity field is changing most.
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Value Added Spatial Applications
Brad Spencer | August 25, 2009
It’s clear that the major supplier of spatial data in
Google don’t capture the spatial data they use in both GoogleMaps and GoogleEarth, but they do deliver a huge value add to the Government generated spatial data that makes up their base maps.
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Using knowledge management principles to fix the global financial system
patrickcallioni | August 25, 2009Complex systems, such as the global financial system, are inevitably going to undergo crises. While crises are unavoidable, we can take steps to lessen their frequency and negative impacts. To do so, we need to develop tools to make the financial system more resilient and capable of self-healing. Knowledge management principles and practices can help to develop those tools and to use them wisely.
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Foundation for Public Interest Journalism Launches
Melissa Sweet | August 25, 2009Some time ago, a Crikey correspondent made an observation along the lines that the problem with the Australian media is that there is not enough real news in this country.I laughed when I first read this, hearing a ring of truth. So much of the news that dominates the headlines will ultimately be judged to have been of little real importance.But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve come to disagree with that witty one-liner.It all depends how you define “real news”. If wars, conflicts and other disasters are the only news that really counts, then who can argue? Australia is relatively blessed on these fronts.But it’s a terribly narrow definition of what matters.
Hotels, Identity Thieves and Terrorism
StephenWilson | August 21, 2009The reservations databases of global hotel chains are a complete cornucopia for criminals.
Radisson Hotels has reported a database breach which has exposed the credit card numbers of guests said to be "limited to an isolated number of hotels in the U.S. and Canada".
Entrepreneurship Education: Unlocking Potential
Karen Wilson | August 21, 2009Interest in entrepreneurship education has grown dramatically around the world in the past 5-10 years. Schools, universities and other training organizations have increasingly been integrating entrepreneurship into their programmes. In addition, national governments and international organizations such as UN, OECD, the European Commission and others have begun to put a greater focus on entrepreneurship education.
The Green Economy also Needs a Plan B
Murray Hogarth | August 21, 2009This blog first appeared on The Fifth Estate and is published here with the kind permission of the author.
Global economies move in strange ways. From an environmental sustainability perspective, more and more observers are saying;Paul-Keating-like, that the current savage global economic downturn after a long boom is a recession we had to have.
So what is the green lining to this dark economic cloud? Three crucial things have happened in the past 12 months.
The recession sucked unsustainable momentum out of indiscriminate, environmentally-damaging global growth; at least for a while.
The building of a green economy with new jobs, investment, innovation, technologies and even consumer behaviours emerged as a fundamental component of today’s prescriptions for economic stimulus and the longed-for recovery.
The challenges for healthcare as Australia’s population ages
Mark Fear | August 18, 2009The Australian Bureau of Statistics projects that by 2050 the percentage of people aged 65 or over will have almost doubled from 13% today to 25% of the population. This change will bring with it the challenge of providing health care and allowing people to maintain a good quality of life as they age. With chronic disease also on the rise (3 million Australians will be diabetic by 2030), health problems in older people are also expected to increase, making the current costs and systems in place for treatment completely inadequate for the future needs of Australia.
Government 2.0: Epic Fail
Daniel Filan | August 18, 2009Barack Obama has his blog, Gordon Brown has his vlog, and now Kevin Rudd has his own blog.
