From the category archives:

australia

Who are the big carbon emitters?

4 March 2010

Earlier this week, @pureandapplied brought to my attention the emissions data that has been published by the Department of Climate Change in Australia. Their report comprises data for the 2008-09 reporting year provided to the Greenhouse and Energy Data Officer by corporations whose greenhouse gas emissions exceeded 125 kilotonnes*. A few corporations are missing from [...]

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The Mule on Mortgages

13 February 2010

So you’ve saved up a deposit for your first house, you want to take advantage of the government’s first home owner grant while you still can, and the bank is actually prepared to lend you money. But how much should you borrow?

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Rethinking the basis for the Australia Day holiday

25 January 2010

January 26 is a nettlesome date for the official celebration of the Australian nation and as a commemoration of our colonial foundation. Apart from the significant nuisance that it falls so close to the end of the holiday season when our minds and emotions are trying to deal with more pressing obligations, it really asks a serious philosophical and moral question.

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Hot and Dry Days Ahead for Australia

13 November 2009

Earlier this month, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology released the October figure for the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI). It showed a precipitous plunge of almost 20 points down to -14.6. Just how significant a drop this is can be seen in the chart below, which shows the distribution of monthly changes in the SOI going [...]

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Melbourne Cup by Numbers

2 November 2009

I don’t know anything about horses. Ever since I was bitten by one at the Easter Show as a small child, they have ranked very low on my animal preference list: only just above geese. Still, at this time of year almost everyone in Australia gets caught up in some way with the Melbourne Cup, [...]

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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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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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Crime Around The Corner

10 September 2009

Observant visitors to this blog may have noticed the recent appearance of a “wiki” button at the top of the page. This links to the recently established Stubborn Mule wiki, which I plan to use as a repository of information relevant in some way to the blog. Since so many of the posts here focus [...]

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How Important Is China?

25 August 2009

Today I attended a presentation by TD Securities global strategist Stephen Koukoulas. While exploring the “green shoots” of recovery, Koukoulas made an interesting observation about China. Many observers of the Australian economy, Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens included, place great weight on the importance of China for Australia’s economy. But Koukoulas pointed out that, while [...]

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Taking It Too Far: Verb and Adjective Clouds

21 August 2009

I will freely admit that I am now going overboard, but commenter Lettuce All Rejoice asked what the Rudd word cloud would look like if it was broken down into nouns, verbs and adjectives. Fortunately, the Stanford Natural Language Processing Group make a statistical parser freely available for download. So, I used this to parse [...]

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