Latest Story
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The harmonisation of national, local and state-based regulation
Martin Tolar | September 4, 2009It is an accident of history that Australia’s constitutional powers rest with the states and not the Commonwealth. Australia’s federal government is limited to passing laws and managing aspects of government business based on the areas of responsibility the states grant them the authority to do so. This has resulted in system of government that has three tiers – and by any measure, made Australia one of the most over-governed countries in the world.
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Wilderness conservation
Peter Cooper | September 4, 2009The global financial crisis has affected many people, but probably most at risk in NSW are our rural communities. Threatened with job losses, industry shut downs and the ever continuing issue of drought and over allocation of water from our river systems, it is easy to see why some communities are in crisis. It’s a crisis that represents a critical test for the Rees Government – can NSW Premier Nathan Rees deliver sound policy decisions based around the best possible economic outcomes or will he play to emotional reactions, to the detriment of local communities?
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The Committee to Protect Bloggers
Andrew Ford Lyons | September 3, 2009This month’s topic on Open Forum is essentially what The Committee to Protect Bloggers is all about: promoting and advocating for international voices.
Because that’s what the collective blogosphere consists of.
In blogs we find voices we recognise along with those we don’t. We come across ideas that inspire and others that enrage; we hear from every corner of the earth if we’re only willing to take a little time to search them out.
For me, blogs are what the web is all about. Sure we have social networks, news portals, dating tools, virtual shopping malls, games and various assorted tawdry offerings that make up much of the web, but blogs are where it gets personal.
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All the President’s Women
Leila | September 2, 2009Ahmadinejad has nominated two women as new ministers for the health, and the welfare and social security: Fatemeh Ajorlou and Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi.
Both of them are members of conservative front in the parliament as well as the supporters of Ahmadinejad. They were among those hard-liners who spoke, last year, in favor of Ahmadinejad’s family law bill which was going to make it easier for men to marry a second wife. They have been defending gender segregation in public sphere such as universities, public transportations, parks, and etc. They believe women’s first priority duties are to serve their husbands and to raise children.
However one could ask them what they are doing in politics instead of committing their “priorities.”
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The Maximalist Republic: Minimalism no longer a viable option
Klaas Woldring | September 1, 2009The Australian Republican Movement (ARM) initiated the debate, but that Movement as well as the ALP and some Coalition politicians deliberately considered only the replacement of the Queen by an Australian President as Head of State. The entire 1990s debate concentrated on that change rather than on the much more important issue “What Kind of Republic?” and the process by which that could be achieved.
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CRCSI-2 Announced
Peter Woodgate | August 31, 2009Over the past year the Cooperative Research Centre for Spatial Information (CRCSI) has developed a strategy for the further development of the Australian spatial information industry called ‘Spatially Enabling Australia’. It has done this in collaboration with about 100 organisations in the public, private and research sectors, principally in Australia and New Zealand, but also with input from organisations in Europe, Canada and Asia. The strategy looks out over the better part of the next decade.
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Breadlines of the Mind for Australia’s Ageing
phil_o_seffy | August 28, 2009I spend most of my days sifting through Aged Care correspondence, and in all that time I come across stories that are both uplifting and some that are incredibly sad.
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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.
