From the monthly archives:

October 2009

The Kindle in Australia

24 October 2009

Initial impressions of the Kindle now that it is shipping to Australia: the good, the bad and the crippled.

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Petrol Price Update

21 October 2009

Oil prices have been heading up, but so has the Australian dollar. So, petrol prices in Sydney for October will have fallen since September.

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I have a love/hate relationship with psychometric testing

19 October 2009

A while ago, I had a bit of a rant in the post I Hate Personality Tests. Responding in this guest post, Maria Skarveli (who knows far more about psychology than I do) ponders personality testing phobia. As a psychology student belonging to the faculty of health and behavioural sciences which also harbours biology, medical [...]

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A better view of the asylum-seeker league tables

19 October 2009

The last post looked at how many applications for asylum Australia and other countries have received this year on a per capita basis. The top three countries in the resulting league table are Malta, Cyprus and Norway and their figures are so much higher than other countries that they skew the data, making it hard [...]

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Is Australia taking its fair share of asylum-seekers?

16 October 2009

In Crikey this week, Bernard Keane made the point that Australia accepts a disproportionately small number of asylum-seekers given our population size. So, where exactly do we rank in the world in terms of generosity towards displaced persons? The United Nations Refugee Agency provides a wide range of statistics about refugees and asylum-seekers. The latest [...]

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Does Switzerland have the world’s best universities?

13 October 2009

Today @jgzebra drew my attention to the Times Higher Education league table of the top 200 univerities in the world. A quick glance at the list shows two US universities in the top three and six in the top 10. And indeed the United States dominates the results, claiming 54 spots out of the 200. [...]

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Cash on the Sidelines?

12 October 2009

Last week, the Australian Financial Review was doing its best to spruik the ongoing prospects for the Australian share market in their front page article “Cashed-up funds have $70bn to invest”. The article is only available online to subscribers, but this quotation sums it up: analysts cite the volume of cash stockpiled as a reason [...]

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Subscribing to the Stubborn Mule

10 October 2009

Recently, a few people have asked me whether they can get automatic updates when new posts are published here on the Stubborn Mule. The short answer is “yes!” And of course it’s all free. Those who are familiar with RSS feeds will already know all about this and need read no further (but should also [...]

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Junk Charts: Secondary Axes

6 October 2009

Data visualisation is a fascination of mine and, as a result, the posts on this blog have featured a wide array of charts. My aim is always to use graphics to help explore data and provide greater insight into whatever phenomena might be lurking in the data. While I have tried to make use of [...]

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