From the category archives:

politics

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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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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Malcolm Turnbull’s Word Cloud

20 August 2009

My last post looked at the favourite words of Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd. In the interests of balance, I will now turn the word cloud lens onto the opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull. Turnbull’s speeches are conveniently assembled online and the graphic below illustrates the frequency of his words from speeches made in 2009. Unlike [...]

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The Big Arms Traders

1 August 2009

My last post looked at the international arms trade. Taking data from SIPRI, I produced maps showing arms exports for a number of countries, including Australia and the USA. While these maps gave an indication of the spread of arms trading, it did not show which are the biggest overall importers and exporters of arms. [...]

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The Arms Trade

27 July 2009

Yesterday iconoclastic commentator on technology, politics and culture, Stilgherrian, shared an interesting discovery on twitter. He had come across the website of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and their Arms Transfer Database. SIPRI has been monitoring international arms trades since 1968 and in the process have assembled an extraordinary database with details of [...]

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No Alternative View of Dubai

3 July 2009

Back in April, I announced that the Mule was to be graced with a guest post providing an alternative, more positive picture of Dubai than the one painted by The Independent. Sad to say, although written, the piece is not going to see the light of day. My guest poster’s employer has ruled out any [...]

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RIAA Continues to Stifle Innovation

18 December 2008

Back in August, muxtape, a popular music playlist site, was forced to close by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Now mixwit have announced that it is closing too. The only explanation offered was as follows: We’ve put a year of work into Mixwit so this choice wasn’t taken lightly. I won’t go into the [...]

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Volkswagen: The Biggest Company in the World?

11 November 2008

One of the more peculiar stories of late in these times of turbulent financial markets is how, briefly, Volkswagen became the biggest company in the world. In the process, hedge funds around the world suffered losses estimated at over US$35 billion. Over the last few years, Porsche has been building a stake in Volkswagen. By [...]

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To Vote or Not?

4 November 2008

On the eve of the US election, occasional commenter here at the Stubborn Mule, Michael Michael, sent me links to a couple of articles on Slate on the merits of voting.  Of course, as an Australian citizen, I don’t have the option of voting in the US election, but the issues raised are relevant to [...]

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Couch Potatoes

8 October 2008

A colleague has lent me a copy of Oliver James’ book “Affluenza” and, while I am not far through it yet, it is scathing in its damnation of the effects of capitalism on individuals in society. At a time when capitalism is rapidly losing it shine on a global scale, with the financial sector collapsing [...]

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