About two months ago, I tried to bring some perspective to concerns about growing government debt in Australia. Last week the opposition has rolled out the “debt truck” to add to the hysteria about growing government debt, so I feel compelled to return to the subject for another attempt. Last time I looked at net […]
Today radio station Triple J finished broadcasting their Hottest 100 tracks of all time, the first all-time vote since 1998. For those outside Australia and not familiar with the tradition of the Hottest 100, it began back in 1989 and results are determined by listener votes. After two more years the format changed and votes […]
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 […]
Property prices have always been a popular topic of conversation in Sydney, but the subject has become more contentious since the onslaught of the Global Financial Crisis. Views on prospects for Australian property prices range from the bleakly pessimistic to the wildly optimistic. Iconoclastic economist Dr Steve Keen is one of the more prominent pessimists […]
I have now uploaded the swine flu data to a Swivel data set. I will update this data set periodically and so the rankings in the chart below should stay reasonably up to date. Data sources: Guardian Data Blog, CIA World Fact Book. UPDATE: A number of people have told me that in a number […]
The Guardian have been publishing swine flu data on their Data Blog. They are sourcing their data from by the World Health Organisation, the US Centers for Disease Control, country health agencies and press reports, which makes their data the most up to date I have found. One thing missing from their data is a […]
Over the last few years, I have posted a number of times on the subject of music. These posts have ranged from the subject of Krautrock to a critique of the RIAA. From now on, I have decided to post pieces which are directly about music (concert reviews, genres, etc) over on The Music Blogs, […]
Regular readers of the Mule will know that I am a bit of a data-mining junkie. Whenever I come across an interesting chart I start Googling for the underlying data. But, even with well-honed Google skills, it’s not always possible to find the data. Sometimes it is simply not publically available. I ran into just […]
The phrase de jour (or du mois in fact) in financial markets is “green shoots”. Optimists, world equity markets included, are seeing tentative signs of improvement in the world economy. Google trends saw a blip in searches for the phrase green shoots back in January when UK Government minister Baroness Vadera used the phrase and […]
In the latest instalment of the ongoing debacle that is BrisConnections, Nicholas Bolton shrugged off the mantle of hero to mum and dad shareholders in exchange for a secretly arranged $4.5 million dollars. I have to admit I would have enjoyed the Schadenfreude of seeing Bolton continue to stick it to Macquarie Bank, but whatever […]