Penguin unearthed

Moving

2006-08-01T20:22:00.000+10:00

After reading how easy it was to move to wordpress from Landismom , and complaints from Tjilpi about how he hates commenting on blogger, I've decided to move. So the new site is:

Penguinunearthed

http://penguinunearthed.wordpress.com

See you over there!

Flexible working

2006-07-29T21:22:00.000+10:00

I've been pondering, after my last post, just how feasible it is to have a workplace with different attitudes to working hours.

It's a horrible time of year right now, which exaggerates the problem, but I'm working in a workplace which has (at one extreme) someone who sent me emails at 1.30 am and 3.30 am on different days this week, and who was in at 9 the next morning both times, and someone who works for me who works in the office two days a week and from home one other day. I'm in the middle; I almost always leave the office by 5.30, but work at home in the evenings a fair bit.

I used to be someone who worked long hours when necessary (my personal record was six hours between leaving the office at night and arriving the next morning), although I've never been the most extreme anywhere I've worked. I used to get paid for it, too; I worked in a place where the bonus system did reward the hard workers, with reasonably good ways of checking that the hours were productive. But I used to really resent those people in the same office who declined to work long hours; that meant that the flexible people had to pick up the slack; always. What I wanted at the time was for the shorter people to still work longer if we had too much to do; what usually happened was that I worked twice as hard, and they usually worked their shorter hours, as they had carved out the right.

Can you only make flexible hours work if everyone works short hours? What if you have a few people who are willing to work slavish hours? Can you make it work if you pay them for it? Or is the only way to get flexible hours for the (substantial) minority who want them, make sure that nobody works stupid hours? Or, to put it another way, are we destined to have two kinds of companies - the family friendly and the not family friendly, with two quite different kinds of workers?

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When I was the person working somewhat stupid hours, I didn't mind them that much because I loved my work, I worked with friends, and E was also working stupid hours, so I was often going home to an empty house (no kids at that stage). Not to say that I always enjoyed them, but I think it's important to acknowledge in this kind of debate that some people really do enjoy their work, and quite like the hours it entails.

Fathers and children

2006-07-23T07:12:00.000+10:00

The ABS released a study (as part of their annual social trends review) of fathers and how much they are working these days. In previous posts, I've trawled through various ABS products to find out how many stay-at-home dads there are. This study answers the question - 3.4% of families with children under 15 had a father not working while the mother worked full or part-time. A further 6.3% had neither parent working.

The ABS didn't analyse how many families had a mother full-time and father part-time (our arrangement) but about 7% of fathers in total are employed part-time, and that's an increase from 4% in just over 10 years. I think that's the big story. I'm on an email list for mothers who work with the dad at home, and I'd say about half of the dads in that group actually have some paid work. So looking just at stay-at-home dads who don't do any paid work is going to miss lots of families where the dad is the primary carer (a very popular pattern with the genders reversed).

But for fathers and mothers working full time, the use of overtime has increased in the last few years. So the world of work is polarising even more into part-time and very full-time jobs. My personal preference for how we would manage our family would be for us both to have serious part-time jobs. But employers would much much rather have one very full time person than two good part time people.

David Maister had a great post on this topic, in which his view (as a consultant to professional services firms, rather than the whole world of work) is that the whole organisation has have the same view about "intensity" (I think he means willingness to drop everything and work), or it won't work, the organisation is in conflict. And from an organisation's view, if you have an unlimited pool of people that you can choose from, I'm not sure that I disagree. But the world isn't like that; if you're trying to choose great people for your organisation, sometimes you have to compromise, and I think I'd rather compromise on intensity than some other things like the ability to talk to people.

Wal-mart

2006-07-15T20:53:00.000+10:00

There's been a fascinating discussion at Slate (via 11D) about whether Wal-Mart is good or bad for the US. Go and read it, but my take is that at least some of the argument boils down to:

1 Wal-mart reduces prices by driving a hard bargain everywhere, but particularly on one of their biggest costs, wages. That makes some people better off (by a little bit) as they pay less for the things they buy.
2 It also pays badly and has horrible conditions - they should pay more to their employees and either charge higher prices (reducing item 1) or make lower profits - thereby benefiting fewer people at the expense of the many.
3 The government should have better benefits for those people who have horrible Wal-mart type jobs, so that there isn't as much income inequality

It reminded me of the shock to my system I got when I was chatting to my New Zealand cousins about their cars. One of them had a Mazda MX5 (a car I have always admired - if I really cared about cars, I would probably have owned one by now). It had cost him, a couple of years old, about half as much as exactly the same car would have cost here in Australia. That's because New Zealand opened up their second hand car market to imports about 10 years ago, and gets all of Japan's cast offs (Japan also having right hand drive, like us, and having very strict road rules about old cars). And they have absolutely no tariffs on new cars either.

Of course, that means that they have no car industry, and the workers who used to make cars in New Zealand don't have jobs. New Zealand doesn't have much industry any more, so unskilled jobs aren't exactly easy to come by.

So which is better? A few people not having jobs and being miserable, and the rest of the country having cheaper cars and a better standard of living? Or more jobs for unskilled workers at the expense of more expensive cars for everyone (and over a reasonable period, a car can be a major expense of a household budget, particularly for poorer people).

I don't actually think there's an easy answer, but I do think that most arguments you see (from either side) tend to ignore one side of the argument. Either they tend to ignore the costs to the rest of society from higher prices by tariffs and increased wage costs, or they tend to pretend that the human cost from unemployment and wages that aren't really enough to live on isn't really worth considering if there's a profit to be made somewhere.

Stylish geekdom

2006-07-14T21:34:00.000+10:00

My cousin's in the International Maths Olympiad, which is currently on in Slovenia. It's a competition for those who are under 20, haven't been to university yet, and with those conditions, are the top mathematicians in their countries, and hence the world. Six contestents per country.

After we found the picture of my cousin, my parents and I amused ourselves by seeing if we could find the country with the most stylish contestents. You wouldn't expect the mugshots from an International Maths Olympiad to exude style, and they don't. But after a random sample through the countries, we decided that the Italians were the most stylish geeks on the planet (and they even have a girl in their team, for extra style points!).

Depends on what you mean by style of course. The Saudis looked suitably exotic, while the Austrians wore matching sweatshirts (which exuded geekiness). I was quite disappointed by the Finns, who I expected to exude scandinavian cool.

Actually, this entire post is probably jealousy from my lack of mathematical talent. I'll be haunting that website to see how my cousin does!

Tipping Points

2006-07-08T21:34:00.000+10:00

After my gloomy posts on global warming, I had to link to RealClimate's recent post on tipping points - a superb summary of all the various things that might tip the planet into a new (probably unpleasant) climatic stage.

Idealism rebounds

2006-07-04T20:59:00.000+10:00

My employer has recently introduced a new policy for all sorts of family friendly stuff - among them, a "breastfeeding friendly workplace". I work in the CBD. We have employees spread across a few different buildings. They have put aside one room in one building for expressing breastmilk. Completely useless to anyone in any other building.

A bit of background - I have expressed in the workplace for six months with both of my children - first child mostly part time, second child full time working. It was important to me - I liked breastfeeding, and it was the one thing nobody else could do for them.

My belief is that the Australian Breastfeeding Association has such idealised requirements for a "breastfeeding-friendly workplace", that what ends up happening is a fairly useless lip-service.

Their requirement is for (among other things) "A clean, private room with a power point, lockable door, comfortable chair, refrigerator, hand washing facilities and breastpump storage area." This tends to reduce, rather than improve the availability of breastfeeding facilities in the workplace.

At my former employer they spent six months refurbishing the old first aid room on a single floor. For me, the six months delay, plus the fact that the floor wasn't my own (and every five minutes counts, when you're trying not to miss the evening feed that night) meant that I just made my own arrangements without any workplace support on my own floor.

In my experience, all you need is:
- a private lockable room (i.e. nobody can see in from the outside of the room)
- a powerpoint in the room
- a chair and table in the room which is reachable from the powerpoint
- a fridge on the same floor
- toilets on the same floor (so you can wash your hands)
- the room is guaranteed bookable for a set period each day

For most white-collar workplaces, even in these days of open plan offices, all that's needed to make that work is to make sure that you can't see into one of the meeting rooms, and that anyone (even the junior employees) can book that one.

If that was the ABA requirement, then it would be much easier for employers to comply, they wouldn't spend six months figuring out how to do it (find a new room that was never used for anything else, buy a new fridge, install a sink), and there would be more rooms available.

For me, I arranged that for myself (I was senior enough to be able to demand the refurbishment of our floor was slightly changed to make one meeting room's glass door not transparent) and the fact that I could go quickly and express, meant that I was more likely to do it twice a day, rather than once, and I kept my supply up for longer (both times supply failures was what made me stop).

I'm sure whoever is responsible at the ABA thinks they're doing the right thing by asking for perfection. I think what that means, though, is employers think it's all too hard. The employees who are senior enough, and/or feisty enough to figure it out for themselves, and ask for something reasonable, manage to work through it. The others get ground down with the hassle, and end up giving up earlier than they would like.

Corporate vs Consulting

2006-07-01T21:01:00.000+10:00

My recent work move was from consulting life into corporate life. I've been there before, but a while ago. Something I really noticed when I moved back is that there are far more "mature"workers, at all levels, but particularly at the junior end. In consulting, whether articulated or not, most firms operate some kind of "up-or-out" policy. If you don't look like you're going to get that next promotion, the firm doesn't want you. So you end up with a pyramid structure, not just by level, but also by age. Whereas corporate life has always had room for the person who doesn't get promoted. You stay there, and sometimes (not as often as in the past) you are even valued for your corporate knowledge.

I probably have a tendency to over-glamorise. Corporate life has treated "mature"workers really badly over the years in ways of redundancies and restructures. But what I hadn't really realised, is that at least they treated them moderately well in the first place. Consulting now seems a bit unhealthy to me, with its unwillingness to place any value on experience, unless it makes you capable of doing the very top job. Ruthlessly removing those people who are in the bottom half of the pool may make for a better structure (and better leverage, for those partners at the top), but it doesn't necessarily make for a wonderful human environment.

Book Review - Field Notes from a Catastrophe

2006-07-01T19:59:00.000+10:00

Today's book review (I'm not promising weekly any more!) is Field Notes from a Catastrophe - Man, Nature and Climate Change, by Elizabeth Kolbert. It is a fairly slim book, based on a series she did for the New Yorker in 2005, and I read it after reading the review on realclimate, a blog by climate change scientists which attempts, as far as possible, to give a non-political review of the science of the various sensationalist discoveries that appear in the press.

I found it, surprisingly, even more convincing and simultaneouslly depressing than Tim Flannery's book (see my earlier review here). The book is a set of, as suggested in the title, field notes from various trips Kolbert has made to places where global warming is very clearly happening. Then in the second half she talks about what the US is doing about it.

The most obvious place is the arctic, where she describes life in an Alaskan inuit village that will have to be moved away from its current island location because the combination of changes in sea-ice and increased storm surges are starting to render it uninhabitable. The scariest part of the arctic visit is the description of permafrost that hasn't melted for millions of years now melting - hard to blame anything other than global warming for that.

I did have a vague idea that the arctic was where things were happening. But the are happening more quickly than the modellers have predicted, and that is very quickly indeed, because of the feedback loops that happen when ice starts to melt.

In her second half of the book, Kolbert has a hilarious account of her meeting with the US Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs - Paula Dobriansky. She is responsible for explaining the Bush administration's position on global warming to the rest of the world. She appears to have three phrases, which were pretty much all she said during the 15 minute meeting; "we act, we learn, we act again", "we view this as a serious issue" and "we have a common goal and objective, but we can take different approaches". Fairly platitudinous when said once, but must have been pretty frustrating listening to each phrase three or four or five times.

Kolbert talks about the politics of it, and comes to a conclusion that the problem with global warming is that everything takes so long. It seems likely that eventually everyone (even China and the US) will take it seriously enough that they act. Unfortunately, but that stage, we may have reached the point of no return. We're currently at 375 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (up from 315 in 1958 when good measurement started). The scientific consensus seems to be that at around 450 to 500 will be the point when catastrophic change (such as melting the Greenland and Antarctic icesheets) will be inevitable. But they won't happen then; they could take another 50 years. So in the meantime, we, the people who elect our politicians, will think shorter term than that, and won't be willing to make the big changes in lifestyle required to stop things happening.

There was an article in the Economist a couple of weeks ago, talking about a talkfest which looked at where you could best spend $50 billion to improve the world. The conclusion was that global warming didn't make it onto the list. Basically, because the solutions are very expensive, the payoff (in terms of avoidance of catastrophe) is so long term, and the costs are so uncertain, we should spend our money on things like improving breastfeeding rates, which has proven costs and benefits.

I don't disagree that improving breastfeeding is important. But I think these models of costs and benefits are failing to model the costs properly. One piece of modelling described in the book is the change in rainfall in continental US under two fairly accepted climate change models. The rainfall that emerged from the models was low enough that California water-resource managers didn't think there was any way they could find enough water to support California. If you put into your cost models a reversion of large parts of the US to desert, would wipe-out of the US economy be sufficient cost worth spending the money?

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In the meantime, I do continue to make poor choices from an environmental point of view. We replaced our hotwater system with another electric one this year; not because we didn't want to spend the money on a solar system, but because the hassle involved was too great - we'd have to get council approval to change the roof of our heritage listed house. And much as I'd like to replace our roof with solar panels when we have to replace it in the next few years, I can't see us seriously doing it - again for the hassle factor. But at least we only have one car, and we catch public transport all over the place.

Antipodes

2006-06-25T08:58:00.000+10:00

I've been reflecting, during the World Cup, at how good we Australians are at watching sport in the middle of the night. But it's part of being a sports fan, here. We've grown up watching pretty much any world class sport in the middle of the night. Think Ashes tests, Wimbledon, US & French Open tennis, Olympics, FA Cup finals, various Golf tournaments etc. etc. And of course the World Cup of Football.

When I lived in London, I suddenly realised that the rest of the world doesn't really do that. Although every now and again there is something on the other side of the world, it's not a standard part of being a sporting fan. A combination of a lot of Australians being fanatical enough about sport to actually watch something in the middle of the night, and that there is very little world sport actually happening in our own time zone.

Just that, by itself, probably gives the average Australian a much better appreciation of the size of the world than people in most other countries. We're not necessarily any more cosmopolitan, but we know from an early age, that exciting things happen in other parts of the world. ____________________________________________

For myself, I have never gone without sleep to watch golf (or even watched it voluntarily), but I have gone without sleep to watch everything else on my list above. And I'm not that much of a sports fan, really.

Introversion

2006-06-21T21:29:00.000+10:00

Via JennyD, I found an on-line Myers-Briggs personality test. I did it out of curiosity to see if my rating would have changed from when I did it 10 years ago at some work love-in. It hadn't, I'm still INTJ - Introverted, intuitive, thinking, judging (the opposites are extroverted, sensing, feeling, perceiving). Each of the 16 possible categories has some wonderful description and adjective that you can model yourself on so that you feel good about yourself.

Doing it knowing what the categories are gives you a slightly different view of what it all means, and I found it interesting when I got to the introversion questions. There are two quite different aspects to introversion, as defined by this test: do you like being the centre of attention? Do you like being with other people? For me, the answers are definitely not, and yes, I really enjoy being in a group of people. But for E, he is an introvert the other way round - he's quite happy being the centre of attention, but needs some time to himself to recharge after being forced into a big group.

It's interesting watching our kids - C takes after E and loves being the centre of attention, but will wander off with a book in the middle of a party. D seems to be taking after the extroverted parts of both of us, so far.

To me the two aspects are so different that it's almost strange that they are both labelled "introverted".

Fandom

2006-06-13T20:06:00.000+10:00

I loved reading Fever Pitch, (one man's story of the highs and lows of being an obsessive Arsenal fan) when I first found it, but I never thought it would apply to me.

But watching the World Cup last night with Australia spending most of the match futilely trying to match Japan's controversial goal before coming good in the last 10 minutes with 3 glorious goals, I was reminded, unexpectedly of Nick Hornby's description of how, when you're a fan, you spend most of the time hating your team for their ineptitude. Every time Australia wasted time passing the ball to each other outside the penalty box before being tackled by the Japanese defence, or alternatively took hopelessly inaccurate shots at goal, I was inwardly cursing their hopelessness.

I realised that the Australian men's soccer team is one of my few experiences with real fandom. I'm not a serious fan in the Nick Hornby mold, but I have come to care. Probably that experience of watching Australia throw it all away in the last few minutes against Iran 8 years ago has made it that way, but who knows what captures the imagination? Suffice to say I'm now even more jealous of my brother's tickets for the Croatia game next week. That one's going to matter.

Gifted education

2006-06-12T19:57:00.000+10:00

I've been mulling over gifted education for a while.

I think that streaming children into different ability levels is, on the whole, a good idea (that's probably the most controversial statement in this post). It probably doesn't matter that much in the middle of the bell curve, but at either end, children will learn better when they are learning with other children who learn at the same rate. Everybody is happy with doing that for sport and music; why not for book learning?

But, on the other hand, it's a good idea for children to be exposed to the fact that not everyone is the same. My son's kindergarten class has a child with Downs syndrome, who is probably operating at the level of my just-turned-three year old at the moment. I do think that it is good for everyone in that classroom to get to know him as a person, and to understand that he's a bit different. But I felt very sorry for him having to effectively sit and entertain himself as I played number bingo with his three classmates who were operating at a level that they could write numbers, and cross them off as they got called out. He has a full time aide though, so most of the time he gets pretty effective one-on-one education.

So the way in which the NSW education department suggests operating gifted and talented programs in infants and primary school - pull outs for a few lessons, rather than full on streaming - seems sensible to me. That's providing the kids who get pulled out are genuinely operating at a higher level (i.e. top 5% at most, not top 15%; probably the top 1% are the ones that really need it), and it seems sensible also to leave the kids together a lot of the time so that they get to know children at different levels as well.

But then the question is whether such programs become yet another way for middle-class parents to get more than their fair share of the education budget within state schools. If the testing for who gets into gifted and talented programs is based on achievements (like early reading), rather than some better measure of intrinsic intelligence (such as an IQ test, with all its faults), it will generally miss the children without rich intellectual home lives, and the children with english as a second language. That's not a reason not to have gifted and talented programs, though; it's a reason to make sure you have good identification methods, so you don't just get the polished middle class kids (although middle class kids can be gifted too!).

The other aspect that is often missed with arguments back and forth about gifted education is friendship. Some (not all) gifted children do find it easier to make friends with those who are also gifted, or operating at their own levels (e.g. an older child). Those children are condemned to loneliness if they never spend time with children their own intellectual ages.

From reading up on the subject, the simplest, cheapest way of providing for gifted children is to allow them to accelerate through school - start young, or skip a year or two along the way. It doesn't require any special programs, or special schools, just acceptance from teachers and schools. Although many teachers think that's a terrible idea, overwhelmingly the research supports it (see this campaigning summary of the research). Some accelerated children have trouble with their older classmates in their teenage years, but many don't, and their non-accelerated peers generally have more social problems along the way, if you do comparative research.

So that's what we've done with our older son - he started school at 4 years 5 months (six weeks younger than he was officially allowed). So far it's going great, and we don't think his classmates have really noticed yet, but I'll keep you posted.

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A couple of contrary links: Laura at 11d had a post a few months ago about how she got really annoyed by gifted education in NY, because it tended to get hijacked by middle-class parents who wanted a good education for their children, but couldn't afford private school fees. And susoz at personal political had a post about the gifted education pull-out classes at her son's school, and how she found their testing methods a bit odd, and found it hard to believe that they would do much good anyway, the way they were structured.

Slow down

2006-06-05T19:37:00.000+10:00

I've decided to slow down a bit on this blog. Notwithstanding all my crowing posts about work-life balance, it's catching up with me.

I started a new job just over three months ago, which I am finding far more interesting and enjoyable than my old job. The main thing is that I am learning, and continuously interested in what I'm doing (even when it's frustrating). But there are two side effects; firstly that in getting up to speed with a challenging role, I'm spending about an hour longer on work every day (mostly at home); and secondly, that because I'm finding it both interesting and challenging, my brain is engaged for even more extra time. So I find myself thinking about work (when not at work) far more than I ever used to.

It's a classic example of the employment phenomenen described in the book Better than Sex (which I reviewed a few months ago) - for an employer, you want someone who is engaged with their work for as much of their waking day as possible, and I am starting to become that person. I'm not necessarily moving that way voluntarily, but when you find a job interesting, sometimes it's hard not to.

So I've decided that since my home life is suffering from this, I'd rather it didn't suffer from thinking up blog posts all the time, too, so I'll only post when the spirit moves me, rather than feeling slightly guilty if I don't post every day or so. I can't imagine that I'll manage to cure my blog addiction entirely, so feel free to check in once in a while! While I've managed to cure blogging as a procrastination device in the office (largely by moving somewhere where I'm actually "engaged" (to use current HR jargon)), I find it hard to go a day without checking my favourite blogs, even just for "10 minutes" (hah!) on the way to bed.

Strollers and obesity

2006-05-27T20:49:00.000+10:00

I'm coming to the conclusion that a major cause of childhood obesity is the excellence of the modern stroller.

These days, the stroller/pram you buy when you first have a baby has enough features to last you to age four, if you wish. And if you don't wish, a new one isn't ridiculously expensive as a percentage of disposable income. And if you have another child, a tandem stroller, or a toddler seat is not that much more than a single stroller. None of that is bad, of course. And, for safety reasons, the stroller, of course, has a five point harness, which also enables you to strap most (not all) toddlers in for a while

But that's not how it has always been. Prams didn't used to convert easily to strollers - you had to prop a child up in an uncomfortable way, or buy another one. I very much doubt when I was little whether anyone could afford to buy a tandem stroller/pram when they had a second child - it would have been a much greater bite out of an income, and far less functional. And without harnesses, it would have been harder to keep a recalcitrant toddler in a pram who wanted to get out and run somewhere.

So mothers were once forced to teach their children to walk reasonable distances from a fairly early age. Their alternative was once to carry the toddler. But no longer. Wander anywhere where children might be out and about. Have a look at the age of the kids in the stroller. It's not uncommon to see four year olds. They might get out and walk for a while, but the stroller is there if they get tired.

Ever wonder why the toddler harness went out of fashion? I don't think it's got anything to do with our reluctance to treat a toddler like a dog on a leash. I think it's because a pram is a much easier way to restrain a toddler. And now that toddlers don't have to be taught painstakingly to walk sensible beside a parent at a reasonable pace, stopping at roads, they are much older before they walk as a way of getting somewhere. So when they're too old to be pushed anywhere, they are not in the habit of walking, and don't have the stamina to walk any great distance.

Of course everything above is a gross generalisation. But kids these days get less incidental exercise than their elders at a very early age, and the pram is just then later substituted by the car, when the distances get longer. Obesity is not just about unhealthy school lunches.

Crackberry

2006-05-24T18:27:00.000+10:00

Yes, I've succumbed, I've got a Blackberry. I've read many articles about how terrible blackberries are, since they encourage you to be available at all times. Laura at 11D hates the idea, after her husband has been forced to get one.

But I think that just like many other things, the effect on your life depends on a combination of you, and your employer. For me, it improves my life because I can check my emails on the bus home. And when I'm at a corporate love-in (as I was on Wednesday) I can check my emails during the breaks, and I know that nothing major has happened back at the office.

But for me, my life is majorly improved by being able to do work at home, because the alternative is to do it at the office. If I can do work at home, I can come home, have dinner with the boys, and then do some more work after they've gone to bed. If I can't work at home, I still have to do the same amount of work, but I have to stay late, and miss a family dinner to do it.

But if a Blackberry means that you end up doing just as much work at the office, and then have to do more at nights and weekends as well, they're a dumb idea.

I know plenty of people who are addicted enough to work that they will do more work by being in contact all the time. And others, like Laura's husband who are pressured into doing more. But sometimes the doom and gloom stories miss that tools like Blackberries (and my remote access to my work's computer network) can actually improve work life balance as well.

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Mind you, I probably should revisit this post in a month's time, before being too smug about my work life balance.

Childcare shortages

2006-05-23T21:09:00.000+10:00

Interesting article in the SMH today about how the lack of childcare is stopping people from working.

A few interesting points; as suzoz pointed here a few days ago, family day care is not that popular, because increasingly the higher standards and professionalism of long day care (whether real or perceived) is more popular. So there isn't as much pent up demand for family day care as there used to be.

And the big pent-up demand is for after school care. Which also makes sense. That point at which your child goes to school is, for many mothers (and fathers, maybe) the point at which it seems sensible to think about working again. But after school care is the least susceptible of all forms of care to market forces. It makes sense to have it on school grounds, so there is always a natural monopoly at each school. And it's not that easy to find carers for the odd hours, so the big listed players can't make much money out of it.

So the coalition solution of leaving the market to provide is very unlikely to work without a bit of help.

As a believer in usefulness of the market for many issues, it annoys me intensely when it's treated as a god that will fix everything, even things that have clear issues that will never be fixed without intervention - natural monopolies, externalities, imperfect information... all things that stop "the market" working. But the coalition seems to want to assume them out of existence.

Serendipity

2006-05-21T20:26:00.000+10:00

This morning, I was in The Rocks, and a band was playing - a double bass, electric guitar, a saxophone, drums and a vocalist (at the muzak end of swing, but very listenable).

I was reminded of a magic evening a few years ago.

I was working in Wellington, NZ on a company acquisition. It happened to be an all female team at that stage of the deal - the client, and three consultants. After a long day, we went out for a quick bite to eat, and were strolling back to our hotel when we walked past the foyer of a theatre, which had a swing band in its lobby bar. It was three or four 20 something guys. I can't remember the instruments exactly, but they were young, enthusiastic, and fantastic. We sat at a table close-ish to the front, and drank it in. We stayed for ages, and chatted between sets about our lives, but during the sets, just enjoyed the music. There were a few people dancing, mostly with panache - a bit of jive, since this was before salsa got big.

Wellington then was only just getting a nightlife; these days Courteney Place is full of fabulous bars and restaurants. But then, part of the magic of the night was the fabulous serendipity. Expecting nothing, we ended up with the perfect evening.

Running

2006-05-20T20:20:00.000+10:00

I've decided that I do need to get fit again. I had all these good intentions about getting into good habits when I started my new job in February; but then I got pneumonia, and my doctor gave me a stern lecture about not exercising until I was totally better. It's been nearly three months now, so I thought I could risk a run this morning (having tested myself by running all the way to the ferry two mornings ago). It probably would have been a new personal worst time if I'd timed myself, but I'm glad I did it.

Every time I go for a morning run, I remember why I like it. The harbour was as still as glass; the runners and walkers were polite and smiled at each other; and when I got back home I felt energised for the day.

In the past, when I've been working ridiculous hours away from home, I've always made a point of going for a run in the morning. It seems to energise me more than an extra half hour's sleep would. But I can never get into that habit at home. I can't think of anything that'll change that now, but I am going to try and go for a run at least one out of two mornings on the weekends again.

Starting young

2006-05-18T20:02:00.000+10:00

I was doing a puzzle with D this evening (who is just 3). It was about a farm, and he asked me "where is the farmer?". I pointed out the woman who was putting hay in a wheelbarrow. He said "girls aren't farmers".

I'm amazed by this, as we have a series of books about "Mrs Boot the Farmer" (who appears to be a single parent of two children), as well as quite a few picture books with a mix of male and female farmers. We had a discussion about it, and he appeared dubiously convinced that both men and women are farmers. C tried to help me by saying from his older brother position of superiority that girls and boys aren't farmers, but I think that made D more determined to stick to his position.

I really thought that we were doing well in subverting the dominant gender stereotypes. Clearly more effort is needed.

Names

2006-05-17T20:31:00.000+10:00

The US has released their stats on names for 2005. I found a link there via some blog or other, and went back to check on my name the year I was born (I wasn't born in the US, but I wasn't born in Australia, either). I reckon from my own personal experience, that Jennifer was the most popular name in Australia in 1967. In my residential college at university, 8% of the women were called Jennifer (or Jenny or Jen). But in the US, Jennifer was only the 10th most popular name in 1967. It only became number 1 in 1970, and then stayed there for another decade.

Freakonomics has a interesting section on baby names, where he reckons you can trace the class system in action by watching a baby name move from the upper classes down to the middle classes, and to the working classes, and then out of fashion.

I wonder whether the names Australians are likely to choose (of all classes) are ahead of the US? Or am I guilty of over-analysing my (admittedly sparse) data. Strangely enough, we never managed to export Kylie to anywhere else.

Australian Club

2006-05-16T19:22:00.000+10:00

I was taken to lunch at the Australian Club today. It's quite a strange phenomenen. In a modern (well 60s) office building, the club has three or four floors decorated in late Victorian english style (to ape the London club it is trying to be). I was in the guests dining room, didn't make the inner sanctum. I enquired of my host how he became a member, and discovered to my amazement that it was a men-only club! I had no idea they still existed, and said so.

Apparently some of the men-only clubs around Sydney are debating whether they should let women in because their membership is declining, but this club is still going OK, even though the average age of members is mid-60s.

I'm not sure that letting women in would make that much difference; even my host said that clubs were really needed back in the days that there weren't many restaurants around town; these days, it's much easier to take someone out to a nice restaurant somewhere.

There are probably fewer people around these days who would be impressed with an invitation to an "exclusive" club - even letting aside the sexist aspect (which certainly didn't impress me once I realised). And if the average membership is in their mid-60s, the quality of the business contacts is probably not as good as it might once have been.

So hopefully these clubs will whither into a genteel decline, as they become irrelevent.

Mothers' Day

2006-05-14T20:54:00.000+10:00

I've always hated the idea of Mothers' Day. It has always seemed so commercialised and meaningless. The recognition aspect has completely fallen by the wayside, and now it's just about commercialism. Lately it seems to have got even more commercialised, so that it is now compulsory for all mothers to be taken out for a fabulous dinner (forget breakfast in bed).

I used to wonder whether I would miraculously convert to being in favour of mothers' day once I became a mother, and hence eligible for all the pampering. I haven't. Even when I was in hospital with a new baby on mothers' day, I found the whole thing faintly ridiculous.

The one aspect of it all that has slightly crept through my barriers is loving the handmade things my boys are bringing home from pre-school and school. It was wonderful to watch C's excitement as he told me not to look under his bed where he was hiding my present.

But I was soon brought down to earth as we were walking through our local shopping centre, with C (an early print addict) reading out all the mothers' day ads and telling me that I must buy a card and present for my mother. Brainwashing starts young these days.

Book Review: Neal Stephenson

2006-05-13T20:49:00.000+10:00

This week's book review is a survey of Neal Stephenson's work. I've lately been on a kick of re-reading all our Neal Stephenson books, partly prompted by tigtog's rave review of SnowCrash. Tigtog's rave was mostly about one of the main characters, YT (a sexy intelligent kick-ass woman), a variant of whom appears surprisingly often (surprising for cyber-punk, which often only has women as sex interests for the male protagonists) in Stephenson's novels.

SnowCrash is Stephenson's most famous seriously sci-fi work, and probably one of only two that actually fits the cyberpunk description. It's a fun romp through a dysfunctional future as imagined in the late early 90s - its descriptions of virtual reality, and the internet (the metaverse) are pretty impressive for something written so long ago. As seems to happen with about half of Stephenson's books, his research is too obvious for me (he is obsessed with linguistics, and while it's interesting, it got a bit turgid after a while). But this book established Stephenson as a major cyberpunk author to rival William Gibson, although Gibson has stayed much closer to the genre since.

My favourite in the properly science fiction description, by a long way, is The Diamond Age. This is further into the future, and although full of technological imaginings, the most interesting thing about the book is Stephenson's imagining the way in which different societies might deliberately organise themselves - with the strongest part of this being his ode to Victorian English culture and why it makes sense. Although the ending is incredibly weak (it seems as if he just lost interest, and tied up the knots - probably was rich enough to avoid proper editing), 98% of the book is great and thought provoking.

Cyrptomnicom, to me, again shows signs of lack of editing. While Stephenson's writing is enjoyable, this book suffers with too much of the research being on the surface. My brother, who writes software for a living, loved this book. For me, who left serious mathematics behind about twenty years ago, the stuff about cryptoanalysis became a chore after a while.

But the best, by far, of Stephenson, is the Baroque Cycle trilogy. This is a tour de force of three volumes set in the late 17th and early 18th century, with Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, and many other key scientists (Huygens, Franklin, Hookes, etc etc) as key, human characters. It is an incredibly human story with two main characters - Eliza and Jack - both from humble beginnings, who dance in and out of European scientific, economic and political history gaily and with penache.

Although, just as in all his other books, Stephenson has clearly done a mammoth amount of research, in this case, the research helps, rather than hinders the plot and character development. After reading these books, actual history of the period is disappointing - you've already read all the facts, and the story isn't written as well.

In my re-read, I've become a confirmed Stephenson junkie (I do have all his other books, but this review was already too long). His strengths - great characters, very funny dialogue, and interesting ideas; weaknesses - over use of research (sometimes) and very weak endings when he seems to get sick of the book. But the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses, and I've enjoyed the re-read.

Tangent: An interesting discussion on book snobbery on Larvatus Prodeo has Neal Stephenson talking about how literary authors don't take him seriously because he's made too much money.

Market forces and childcare

2006-05-11T20:20:00.000+10:00

The AFR this morning had an interesting article about the budget plans to improve childcare.Apparently, the way in which this government will improve childcare is to "improve market intelligence".

"Family and Community Services Minister Mal Brough is adamant that leaving the
provision of childcare to the market will solve problems of undersupply, despite
the industry warning that market forces have failed so far....Mr Brough said
he was confident more family day-care providers would open when the government
was able to give them up-to-date information about levels of supply and demand."

This "solution" seems to suggest that family-day-care providers (who remember, are only allowed to care for a maximum of five children at a time, in their own house, and often that includes one or two of their own), are such accomplished business people that they will go to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, check out where there is a gap in the market, move house to that location, and then start up their new business.

Really? Could it be that the reason that there are few family day care providers in the areas that need them - areas which have a lot of two-income families - is because only two income families can afford to live there? And family day care does not provide a wonderful income, particularly if, as is often the case, two of the children are your own.

The government is pinning its hopes on new family day-care services opening
in areas of undersupply when rules preventing the duplication of care are
abolished.

A separate article in the AFR today has the headline: "It's the same old message to mothers: stay at home". This article shows that, as usual, dual income families have received less from the budget than single income families with the same income. The AFR says that "Treasury analysis of how the family tax benefits and tax cuts will be distributed has confirmed working mothers are still better off staying home."

I think that's the real story.