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Five Down

7 May 2010

One of my favourite blogs is Futility Closet, which is sadly appropriate given its tagline “An idler’s miscellany”. This week it featured a puzzle called Five Down devised by the English mathematician Henry Dudeney. Since the subject of the puzzle is money, it seems like an appropriate one to share here on the Mule.

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The Re-birth of the Tablet

5 May 2010

The iPad looks set to inject new life into the tablet computer, which has been limping along for the last 10 years, not dying but not setting the world on fire either. Even so, I am not about to dump my Kindle.

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Cash rates and mortgage rates

4 May 2010

The Reserve Bank of Australia may be raising official interest rates today, but what is link exactly between the Reserve Bank rates and mortgage rates?

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Gigabang for your buck

1 May 2010
Small ISP chart

The Age and the Herald published an extremely junky chart about broadband plans that hides some anomalies in the data and provides a valuable lesson on the importance of good charting technique.

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The Mule trips up

21 April 2010

In my last post, I fell into a common trap when dealing with financial time-series data: I did not adjust for inflation. This post fixes that by looking at growth in “real” personal consumption in the US.

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Has the US consumer shaken off the financial crisis?

19 April 2010

American consumers appear to be returning to their traditional role of fueling the global economy as consumption shows strong growth for the fifth month in a row.

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Where is debt headed now?

20 March 2010
Debt levels - thumbnail image

As expected, government debt levels exhibit a marked up-swing. What is striking, however, is that the levels of household debt have not yet fallen. While US and the UK are consumers “deleveraging”, Australian households are showing no signs yet of reducing their debt.

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Symbol Soup – using tags in the Mule Stable

14 March 2010
Tags

The first time you visit the Mule Stable it can look a bit like a symbol soup, full of # symbols, @ symbols and exclamation marks. But these symbols are in fact a short-hand that can turn posting simple text messages into something a lot more powerful. In this demo video, I run through all the different types of tag symbols you can use on the Mule Stable.

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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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Mule Stable demo video

25 February 2010

A demonstration video showing how to get started on the Mule Stable discussion forum. Anyone familiar with Twitter will feel at home straight-away, for everyone else, this video should ease your way into posting in the Stable.

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