September 2010

When is a bet a derivative?

29 September 2010
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Six months ago, the ASIC was rattling its sabre, threatening to “shut down” online betting agency Centrebet if they continued to allow punters to bet on stock market and interest rate moves. In this post, the Mule wonders why hasn’t Sportsbet come in for the same treatment?

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NBN in more than 140 characters

27 September 2010
Colourful Optic Fibres

migNow that Labor has scraped their way back into power, it looks very likely that the National Broadband Network will go ahead in some form or another. Debates on the merits of the scheme continue apace, not least on Twitter, conveniently labelled with the #nbn hashtag. One frequent twitter on this topic, @pfh007, is also [...]

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Purchasing Power Parity postponed

21 September 2010

The Australian dollar has been going for a bit of a run over the last few weeks and many commentators are concerned that it has become over-valued. A widely quoted Bloomberg article published yesterday argued that the Aussie is 27% over fair value compared to the US dollar. Australian Dollar vs US Dollar (Jun 2009 [...]

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How old is the Mule?

12 September 2010

According to one automated blog analyser, I am rather older than I thought I was: stubbornmule.net is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is academic and upset most of the time The gender is correct and academic writing style I can accept, but I am not so sure [...]

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A Delicate Balance

12 September 2010
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Ever since Julia Gillard managed to scrape through to a second term in government, speculation has focused on how long the arrangement can last…what do you think?

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Protovis now working in Chrome and Safari

7 September 2010

Thanks to everyone who responded to my experimental Protovis post*, whether in the survey, via twitter or in comments on the post. It quickly became clear that my trick for including the code to generate the chart completely failed to work in Chrome and Safari browsers. I still do not fully understand why that is, [...]

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Getting Protovis working on WordPress

6 September 2010

When I started experimenting with Protovis*, I quickly found that getting it to work in a WordPress blog was rather fiddly. With a lot of help from Google (and this page in particular), I managed to piece together what needed to be done, but since I did not find any explanations specifically focused on Protovis [...]

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Experimenting with Protovis

6 September 2010

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk on using graphics in R. During the question session, someone asked whether I had tried using Protovis, a javascript data visualisation library being developed at Stanford. It was an easy question to answer: no! However, a bit of subsequent investigation revealed that Protovis has been developed [...]

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Keynes on Economics

3 September 2010

I have always enjoyed the way John Maynard Keynes had with words. He was responsible for many a bon mot, such as “in the long run we are dead” (skewering the idea of long-run equilibrium in economics), “It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong”, “Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most [...]

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