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UncategorisedThey shoot girls, don’t they?*
tamaraplakalo | October 21, 2007When survival of the fittest calls for infanticide, it is girls that get culled …
“I have to marry off four daughters and I am not financially capable of taking care of another girl,” said an Indian man after the local police arrested him for an attempted murder of his two-day old granddaughter. The man buried the baby girl alive in a field near the Indian city of Hyderabad. It was the passers-by who spotted and saved the baby as her little hand was protruding from her intended grave.
When a baby girl is born in countries such as India and China, friends are often reluctant to congratulate the newborn’s family. Some parents dread the possibility of having a daughter, as girls are seen as an unwelcome drain on family finances. In the patriarchal constellation of the Hindu tradition, male descendents are considered the rightful heirs to all family property, and only they can ignite a funeral pyre at the Holly River Ganges.
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UncategorisedA wasted decade
proberts | October 19, 2007In the innovation battle, Australia has lost at least a decade …
The federal government has been quick to trumpet a recovery in business spending on R&D – so called Berd. That Berd has risen above one per cent of gross domestic product for the first time is a great achievement, and follows an increasing recognition by business of the importance of innovation and investing for future growth.
But positive business sentiment to innovation is only part of the story and perhaps not the most important part. There is evidence that business has been responding as much to a 175 per cent tax deduction being offered for certain types of business R&D.
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UncategorisedShaping Government policy: Online Survey update
editor | October 15, 2007We are pleased to report that our 'Shaping Government Policy' Survey received a fantastic response from the Open Forum community, and would like to thank you all for your contribution and ideas, as well as for the wonderful show of support for our open democracy project. The survey results have been presented to the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), and will be used to inform the Australian Government Consultation Blog project.
A summary of the findings will be reported in the next Open Forum newsletter.
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Uncategorised
Death has no appeal*
tamaraplakalo | October 12, 2007Capital punishment is a difficult question that presents us with a great ethical dilemma – is the victim's right to justice greater than the perpetrator's right to life? And can the question be asked in such a way at all?
Anyone who has ever read Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment has undoubtedly developed a greater understanding of at least one (in this instance fictional) perpetrator of the greatest crime – murder.
Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov, arguably Dostoyevsky’s most famous character, is a desolate student living in St Petersburg. His nihilistic distaste for humanity and a belief that he belongs to a different kind (he thinks of himself as an extraordinary man who can transgress moral laws), leads him to — in his eyes justifiably — murder a hated pawn-broker.
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UncategorisedThe price of technology – manners anyone?
alison gordon | October 4, 2007Aside from convenience and accessibility, new technologies have brought us the lack of us private space and a need for technology etiquette …
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Uncategorised
When transition pirates become ‘great achievers’
tamaraplakalo | October 1, 2007Should the transition nouveau riche , who acquired their wealth almost overnight in the murky waters of marketisation, be unconditionally admitted to the ranks of great achievers?
Only five people on Forbes's list of the world's richest individuals beat Oleg Deripaska, the 39 year old Russian oligarch, who recently raided his US$30 billion kitty to acquire a 5 per cent stake in General Motors. That despite the fact that he can't enter the United States due to the suspicious origin of his wealth.
For the record and just in case you wondered, Roman Abramovich, best known to Western audiences as the owner of the English Premier League football club Chelsea, is no longer the richest Eastern European. His ‘paltry' US$22 billion, the lack of love from the Putin regime, and a US$300 million divorce, have cost him the not-so-coveted position at the top of the Wprost list of the 100 richest Eastern Europeans (50 of whom are billionaires). Most of them have been accused of getting rich by privatising the national resources of their respective countries of origin. All of them are on the Forbes global billionaires list.
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Uncategorised
Furnishing innovation
proberts | September 25, 2007Australian furniture design, more Moonee Ponds than Milan, could benefit from a little innovation …
Like most men I rarely find much to look at in shopping brochures. But glancing through a Harvey Norman catalogue on the weekend brought me face to face with something new. Australian furniture designers appear to be discovering the power of design.
Gerry Harvey does us all a great service by choosing to showcase Australian made furniture in his stores – he knows bulky fashion items like sofas can be made competitively here and there are no months-long supply chains to worry about.
But until recently while competently designed, the Aussie product was more derivative than innovative or inspiring. This is a product of history – furniture makers in the past would visit Italy for furniture shows and then intepret what they saw.
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Uncategorised
Implementing a Rational E-Health System in Australia
alison gordon | September 25, 2007On September 19 2007 a strategic workshop discussing the challenge of implementing a rational e-health system in Australia was held in Parliament House, Canberra. Convened by Global Access Partners, it featured a paper commissioned by the Australian Centre for Health Research and written by Professor Michael Georgeff, Director of E-health Research, Monash University.
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Uncategorised
Globally (dis)connected
tamaraplakalo | September 24, 2007Digital divide is only one problem we’re facing in realising the promises of a unified, Internet-enabled virtual future …
SARAJEVO – I had an interesting conversation with my boss the other day. As I am currently stationed in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a place where democratisation and transition experiments are mixing with the post-war recovery, he wanted to know if there are any interesting Internet-related projects happening here. He assumed that here, like everywhere else on the planet, social and economic activities are gravitating towards the virtual space.
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Uncategorised
Facilitating consultative democracy
tamaraplakalo | September 11, 2007Political needs of a system (or a time), often determine what democratic political participation actually means.
Democratisation is a term that is most often used to describe the process of increased political participation. In the past, political participation was described as voting, joining a political party, or in the case of some experimental social engineering projects of the 20th century, such as Yugoslavia's socialist self-management, as creating consultative bodies at all levels of social, economic and political activity, regardless of their success. In its less democratic forms, political participation has historically been facilitiated through rallies, rioting, lobbying, formation of nationalist movements, paramilitary or other pressure groups, in other words, by any means serving the human need to exercise political will.
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Uncategorised
Valuing Spatial Data
Nick Sharp | September 11, 2007There's lots of information and policy advice on spatial data pricing but not much about establishing the value of spatial data be it physical $ costs such as collection, storage etc or intrinsic as in the more it is used the more value it has. We know there is large $ investment in spatial data […]
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UncategorisedAnd the Heart of Sarajevo goes to … film
tamaraplakalo | September 2, 2007The rising star on the European film festival circuit, Sarajevo Film Festival remains more of an experience than a film marathon.
There is something to be said for the festivals of art and culture in the “countries in transition”, as they are fashionably referred to in global political circles. Last week, Steve Buscemi, in attendance at the Sarajevo Film Festival, which successfully wrapped up for the 13th time a few days ago in the Bosnian capital; semi-jokingly observed that his latest feature, Interview, was seen by more people in its one Open Air cinema projection in Sarajevo, than during its entire US cinema release season.
The first Sarajevo Film Festival was held in the basement of the Bosnian Academy of Performing Arts during the worst year of Sarajevo’s 1990s siege, in 1994. Fitting the surreal concept of a film festival in a war zone, it opened with Quentin Tarrantino’s Pulp Fiction.
At the time, a foreign journalist asked a respected local theatre director: “Why a festival during the war?”. The director responded, “Why a war during the festival?”. For those of you wrapped in the reality of mortgage repayments, APEC city shut-downs, Joey’s ecstasy taking, terrorism and economic performance, it may seem like a strange conversation. But the poignancy of it really hits home for anyone who has ever posed an existential question or two.
