by cameron | Jun 21, 2008 | Australian politics
I’m very excited to see that OpenAustralia, the local version of TheyWorkForYou is online and in beta testing. Congrats to everyone involved. It’s something I’ve been wanting to see happen in Australia for years.
Reading through the site and its’ associated blog tonight, I discovered a couple of interesting points about transparency in Australian politics, good and bad.
The good was Kevin Rudd’s explanation of the nationwide FuelWatch system he’s implementing, to the chagrin of the opposition. From his explanation in Parliament this week and this release on his website (which is a couple of months old but, hey, I’ve been busy), it sounds like a good system to me. I think providing transparency on the issue of petrol prices is exactly what the government should be doing. It prevents them from interfering in the market by either placing a ceiling on petrol prices or getting more directly involved in competition regulation. They provide information and let the people decide which retailers they will buy their petrol from. It’s pretty hard to argue with. Interesting to see the Liberals *still* siding with the oil companies even after losing the last election so badly. All of the post-election rhetoric about having to change and listening to the people has obviously been put aside.
The bad thing I read was on the OpenAustralia blog where they have been trying to get access to the Register of Members’ Interests. What’s that? According to OA:
As you may know, the Register of Members’ Interests says who or what organisations are paying what to members of the House of Representatives. This is a really important document that explains who is financially influencing your Representatives.
So basically you get to see who is bribing your local MP to send them a favourable vote. You would think that this information would be pretty important in a representative democracy, right? So, where is it? Here’s what OA was told:
Not only, as mentioned before, is the register only kept in one office in Canberra, and not available online for everyone to see, it is not even available in electronic form.
Rather, the Register of Members’ Interests is a set of 7 binders with around 1500 A4 sheets in them, which are continually updated (by hand) throughout the course of the parliamentary term. Supposedly, many of the sheets are handwritten.
In other words, it is being deliberately made difficult for members of the general public to get access to. This has to be changed. We need to start a campaign to build awareness around this issue and get the Rudd government to address it. We all should have the ability to see who is lining our politicians’ pockets. This information should be readily available to everybody.
by cameron | Jun 20, 2008 | Australian media, Australian politics, Podcast
Today I got to chat with another person I admire – Stephen Mayne. As I’m sure most of you will know, Stephen is the founder of Crikey.com.au. These days he is also running a video podcast “The Mayne Report” where he takes his video crew into Annual General Meetings for some of Australia’s largest companies and asks the questions other finance journalists are too scared to ask. He is also a co-founder of Kwoff.com, an Aussie news aggregation service.
Stephen has been using his media properties for the last decade to fight corruption and incompetence in Australian politics and corporations. He has fought the good fight AND became a millionaire when he sold Crikey a few years ago. So he’s living proof that you can focus on making a positive difference and also make some money along the way.
Today I capture some of that background, dig into the roots of his activism, discover how big business uses fake defamation lawsuits to pay kickbacks to friendly politicians, and learn about Stephen’s plans for his shareholder activism network.
And if you’re wondering who Patricia Piccinini is, check out these examples of her work!
And is it just me, or does Stephen carry a very striking similarity to the famous portrait of Joshua Smith by William Dobell?
The G’Day World theme music:
Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)
More On This Album
by cameron | Jun 16, 2008 | Podcast, science
Today I talk about what I’ve learned recently from the following books:
- Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (2003)
- The Rise And Fall Of The Great Powers by Paul Kennedy (1988)
- Understanding Power by Noam Chomsky (2002)
I also talk about
- an alternative to Hiroshima
- the Roadrunner supercomputer
- why a high IQ is linked to atheism
- my ideas for an Australian version of TED
- the future of media
- why science needs a celebrity makeover
Today’s music:
Conquest
“Secrets of Life” (mp3)
from “End of Days”
(Dark Star Records)
More On This Album
Dosh
“If You Want To, You Have To” (mp3)
from “Wolves and Wishes”
(anticon)
More On This Album
by cameron | Jun 12, 2008 | media 2.0
Paul Ryan asked me to write a story for the June/July issue of Anthill about digital media and entrepreneurship. I ended up writing something about how it seems to me that digital media entrepreneurs require a higher code of ethics, a higher vision, than your run-of-the-mill online entrepreneurs. Click on the image below to read the full article.
by cameron | Jun 9, 2008 | science, singularity, transhumanism
Hans Moravec has suggested that the human brain has a processing capacity of 10 quadrillion instructions per second (10 billion MIPS). In comparison, it was announced today that the fastest supercomputer in the world, called Roadrunner and devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, is capable of handling 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.
In 2007, it was announced the previous fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene /l, had been upgraded to achieve 478 TFLOPS sustained and 596 TFLOPS peak. So in less that 12 months, we’ve doubled (hey, I should create a law around that prediction).
So, if Moore’s Law holds out:
2009 – 2 QIPS
2010 – 4 QIPS
2011 – 8 QIPS
2012 – 16 QIPS – which puts it 6 QIPS above the suggested ability of a human brain.
Are you ready for that? Do you think the human race is ready for that?
We have NO IDEA what the consequences of that are. On one hand, it could be nothing. On the other hand, what if sentience is nothing more than massive computation?
Either way, here we are, a mere 4 years before a machine is likely to be built which will have a bigger brain than a human and we aren’t even discussing what that means for the human race.
Well, that’s not exactly true – Tyler’s Singularity Institute are discussing it, but where is the debate in mainstream media, in the government, in polite society?
It reminds me of a chat I had with Australian SF author Damien Broderick over dinner about ten years ago. I asked him when he thought these subjects would be discussed by the general populace. He replied “when it’s way too late to do anything about it”.
