ERA Report Released

The ARC (Australian Research Council) has released the ERA report (Excellence in Research for Australia). I've blogged before about this process. The Australian newspaper provides a graphic of the ranking of universities:ANU comes top and Melbourne second which isn't a surprise. UQ is third though which is higher than many may have expected. Melbourne is top ranked in economics though. That isn't

Leadership, Social Capital and Incentives Promote Successful Fisheries

A paper in Nature by Nicolas Gutierrez et al. carries out a meta-analysis of the literature on fisheries management. 130 fisheries are included. The aim was to test whether community co-management can promote sustainability as argued by Ostrom and others. They coded success of the fishery according to number of social, ecological and economic outcomes achieved and also counted the number of

Book Citation Index

Thomson Reuters is adding a "Book Citation Index" to the Web of Science. With the exception of some book series, up till now if your book publication was cited in a journal covered by the Web of Science that citation to your work was included in the Citation Index. But citations to your work in books, even from prestigious presses such as Cambridge were not included. The main source I currently

Cold Fusion Again?

I still remember how excited I was back in 1989 when the original claim of achieving of cold fusion was made. I remember sitting in the communal kitchen where I lived in North London and excitedly telling someone about how important it might be if it was real. They were surprised that I was excited about this one news item. Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall were to come later that

ARC Releases New Discovery Program Instructions

A couple of weeks ago the ARC released the new funding rules for this years grant applications. Now they have finally http://www.arc.gov.au/ncgp/dp/dp_instructions.htm">released the instructions for this year's applications. The main change that I have noticed so far are:1. Instead of separate sections on "Significance and Innovation" and "Approach and Methodology" in the Project Description (

A New Index from Jorge Hirsch: h-bar

Jorge Hirsch is a physicist at the University of California, San Diego who is mostly famous (outside physics at least) for inventing the h-index. A scholar's h-index is the number of his or her academic papers that have received at least h citations. It has become popular in large I think because it is easy to compute using Google Scholar or the ISI citation index. The main obstacles to

Early Bird Registration Extended to 29th January

If you are interested in sustainability and cities you might be interested in attending this conference to be held next month in Melbourne. Early bird registration has been extended. Visit the conference website to register.

Appointment in Crawford School

As of today I am an associate professor * in the Crawford School at ANU though only for the duration of 2011 at the moment. I'll be moving to the Crawford Building some time soon. In the coming semester I am teaching POGO 8016 The Economic Way of Thinking I, which is part of the Graduate Diploma in Policy and Governance program.* This rank is equivalent to full professor in the US system or at

Limits to Craziness

Should some academic papers not be published just because they seem too crazy? There is an interesting debate in the New York Times about whether a psychology paper claiming experimental evidence for people being able to predict supposedly random future events should have been published or not. I am in favor of papers that use solid methods being published, however, crazy the hypothesis that they

And Today a New Lighting Technology...

Another new technology to report on: http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/energy/26230/?ref=rss">lighting using cathode ray tube type technology. The claim is that it is cheaper than LEDs and safer than fluorescents.

China Meets Goal of Reducing Energy Intensity by 20% from 2005 to 2010

China claims that the goal of reducing energy intensity by 20% over 5 years has been met. The article should state BTW that energy intensity was cut 14.4% "by" 2009 not "in" 2009. A lot of us were skeptical that China could achieve this target. Two things helped achieve the target:1. Revisions to GDP that resulted in the growth rate of GDP in the earlier years of the period being revised up.2.

ARC Releases Funding Rules for 2012 Discovery Program

The ARC has released the new rules for projects starting in January 2012. The deadline for applying is 21 March 2011. The rules have been significantly changed and much simplified. The new document is about 1/3 the length of the old one. The main change is the introduction of "Discovery Outstanding Research Awards" (DORA - not to be confused with Dora the Explorer :)). These replace the

Artificial Photosynthesis

Interesting innovation - solar furnace that uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water to carbon monoxide and hydrogen. These are necessary inputs in the Fischer-Tropsch process of synthesizing liquid hydrocarbons. So, this is effectively artificial photosynthesis. At the moment, the efficiency is no better than plant-based photosynthesis and the reactors would be more expensive than

Nighttime Image of Beijing and Tianjin from the International Space Station

Another cool (?) image from NASA. Taken by an astronaut aboard the space station, hence the oblique angle.

December 2010 Report on CCEP Working Papers

The CCEP Working Papers Series is off to a nice start in terms of downloads through RePEc. Total downloads for December were 292 with 171 abstract views. A lot of the downloads were generated by the NEP reports that the papers appeared in, which is why some papers have more downloads than abstract views. The sustainable rate of downloads will likely not be so high for those papers. Peter Wood's