Energy Quality

I just got a "revise and resubmit" for my paper on energy quality. I think the comments should be easy to deal with by putting in a bunch of caveats. I now have three paper resubmissions to deal with but have been so busy with everything else (Environmental Economics Research Hub project, ARC proposals etc). After the Adelaide conference I really need to get to these...

Gapminder

Gapminder have produced one of those cool animated bubble graphs from my sulfur data, you can play with it here. They also have an interactive stack chart. Here is the founder of Gapminder, Hans Rosling in action at TED.

Comment Moderation

Because of spam comments from this this guy and others I'm turning on comment moderation for older posts...

But Swedish Social Scientists are Right Wing

According to this new study Swedish social scientists are more likely to vote for the right wing parties than left wing parties. This is of course, in marked contrast to the situation in the US and anecdotally in Australia. The authors note though that:"Here we have to keep in mind that an american academic to the left may, in actual views, be close to a swedish academic to the right."However,

Too Big to Fail

The Obama administration is acting to do something about the too big too fail phenomenon, which I flagged as a possible policy direction. I'm not enthusiastic though about the anti hedge fund/proprietary trading moves that are accompanying this. Luckily none of the crazier ideas in Jackson's book are included. I'd favor limits on risk budgets rather than just banning institutions from certain

Conservatism of Non-Academic Scientists

There's been discussion lately about how "liberal" professors are (at least in North America). For example, this blogpost and the paper by Ethan Fosse and Neil Gross. The latter argue that people with liberal political views are more likely to want to become professors. Demographic differences explain 43% of the difference in liberalism between professors and others.The interesting thing to me is

ARC vs. NSF

I've been doing more work on my upcoming ARC proposal including meeting with ANU's pro-VC for research (who used to work at the ARC as "Executive Director, Humanities and Creative Arts and as the co-ordinator of the Discovery Projects scheme") and getting her feedback. I've commented before that compared to the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) the Australian Research Council (ARC) appears