Kings Park Honour Avenues Plaques

Kings Park in Perth has plaques dedicated to Western Australians who died in service and who are either buried overseas or have no known grave.

Honour Avenue plaques sit poignantly against a backdrop of eucalypt trees. Each bears details of service personnel who died during war service and were either buried overseas or have no known graves.

I have often wondered if there is a database of these plaques and it turns out there is.

Garlic, sweet potato and chickpea soup recipe

Dan Lepard's Garlic, sweet potato and chickpea soup.

Achieving more by doing less

In The Secret to Success: Do Less, Then Obsess Morten Hansen interviews Eric Ries on the subject of doing less instead using a narrow focus to succeed.

Morten: Yes, I set out to get at the question, “Why are some managers and employees performing far better than others?” Of course, talent plays a role, education plays a role, how hard they work plays a role. But I studied 5,000 people to find out what really makes a difference, and one key factor is that those who really excel are incredibly good at applying intense focus. They choose a few activities, they say no to others, and then they obsess over those activities. I call it the “Do less, then obsess” principle.

...

Eric: Absolutely. We have a concept in the Lean Startup movement called “minimum viable product,” or MVP. And the idea is, we want to do the least amount of work necessary to start learning from customers, and we descope as much as we can to get that simple initial thing in the market. Many famous companies began with a very humble initial product, and only added features and became more complicated later.

I enjoyed this bit because I think most reports are a complete waste of time. Either no-one reads them, or those that do are probably wasting their own time as well as the authors. This comment is by Morten:

One of the things I discovered in my research is how you need to innovate your own work. I did an academic study in a large company, and I traveled to their Colorado site to meet with this project manager. He was very busy, and he was waving me off—“I’m very busy, can’t talk to you today. Come back tomorrow.” I said, “What are you working on?” [He said,] “I have to finish this quarterly report to headquarters, which is due tonight,” and he told me what the report was about.
What he did not know, which I knew since I was coming from headquarters, was that nobody read that report anymore. It was an outdated report. He finished the report, and he met his objective for his job, but he produced zero value because nobody read the report.

Income: Tennis vs Golf

In Tennis players want more money? It's not as absurd as it sounds Greg Jericho compares the income of top tennis players to top golfers. In summary, for men, unless your right at the very top (think Federer or Nadal) you're better off being a golfer. Women, however, are better off playing tennis.

The main problem with the NBN

Greg Jericho identifies The main problem with the NBN lies within the government’s intent.

When your objective is to provide an internet service that’s good enough just to download Netflix, there will be problems

On the conviction of Dr. Hadiza Bawa-Garba and Isabel Amaro over the death of Jack Adcock

Andrew McDonald's oped was the first I had heard of this case and so I might be biased by his framing of it: Death of British boy has worried junior doctors all over the world - with good reason

Report in Fairfax: Australian doctors 'disturbed' by manslaughter conviction against Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba

This is how the UK tabloid press seem to be reporting the case: What about my son? Mother's fury as doctor who let boy die goes free after pleading she has to care for her own disabled child

By contrast, Saurabh Jha MD: To Err is Homicide in Britain – The Case of Dr. Hadiza Bawa-Garba

In the ward, Jack received enalapril. Dr. Bawa-Garba had not prescribed enalapril, and she clearly stated in her plan that enalapril must be stopped – the drug lowers blood pressure and is absolutely contraindicated in shock. Nor was enalapril given by the nursing staff – they stick to the doctor’s orders.

So who gave the enalapril?

And the BMA's statement: The Bawa-Garba ruling: our response

"Secret Barrister" has written about the case, pondering "Trial by a jury of one’s peers" and the similarities between the situation that Dr Bawa-Garba found herself in, and that of barristers involved in criminal trials in the UK: Bawa-Garba: Is it right to let lay juries rule on matters of professional competence?

RAJ AC Explains has a two parter on the case: Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba – Part 1: what does this case look like to medics? Dr Hadiza Bawa-Garba – part 2: what the courts said and why it matters

Michael Skapinker from the Financial Times makes some good points about the impact of the Dr Bawa-Garba decision on public safety: We should learn from doctors’ mistakes, not fire them

Peacock Johnston Solicitors discuss Scottish law and courts: “Doctors in the Dock: Are the Courts moving towards assigning criminal liability to Health Professionals?”

Belfer Center releasese playbook on cybersecurity for election campaigns

The Belfer Center has released The Cybersecurity Campaign Playbook, a bipartisan guide for political campaigns on improving their cybersecurity.

The information assembled here is for any campaign in any party. It was designed to give you simple, actionable information that will make your campaign’s information more secure from adversaries trying to attack your organization - and our democracy.

Media treatment of industrial action

In A Different Strike Story Victoria Rollison compares how the media reported and framed a strike by Fairfax journalists and strikes by employees of other organisation.

When reporting on industrial action the media usually frames the unions as being the villains and the customers and employees the victims.

By contrast:

So, how are the journalists framed in the story? Are they villains for disrupting newspaper consumers? Nope. Are they framed as villains for disrupting the profit-making venture they work for and for hurting the company’s capacity to keep other staff employed, thereby threatening more job losses? Nope. They are framed as the victims. The victims of the job cuts. The victims of terrible business decisions. The victims of a workplace dispute which has led them, unhappily, to have to strike to have their (incidentally, already very powerful) voices heard. And better than that – they are also framed as the heroes, for standing up for their rights, for not letting the company get away with doing something wrong, for, yes, you guessed it, showing the brave, respected characteristic of solidarity.

The failure of asset recycling

In Asset recycling may look new and exciting. But it's the last gasp of a failed model John Quiggin explains why asset recycling is a dud.

Viewed from the other side of the planet, asset recycling may look new and exciting. In reality, however, it was the last gasp of a failed model. The government’s asset recycling fund, established in 2014, was shut down in 2016, with barely half of its budget allocation spent.

The core problem with the “recycling” idea is that income-generating assets were sold to finance new investments that did not generate income. Rather like selling your house to buy an expensive car, this is a trick that can only be done once, and leaves governments with increased net debt.

Kansas vs California: a tale of tax

In Donnie, We’re Not In Kansas Anymore David Cay Johnston compares the impact of tax cuts in Kansas and tax rises in California on their respective economies.

Since the tax changes, the California economy has grown 1.7 times faster than the Kansas economy. Perhaps even more significant, California grew its share of the national economy from 13.8 % of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product to 14.2%. Kansas stayed flat at 0.8% of national GDP.

...

Further west, in tax-raising California, jobs increased much faster. While jobs grew in Kansas by 3.8%, in California the lift was 11.8%.

Nikon Lens Simulator

This is a useful tool to compare different lens sizes: NIKKOR Lens Simulator

Fake News and Pizzagate

In Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal Amanda Robb examines the "web of conspiracy theorists, Russian operatives, Trump campaigners and Twitter bots who manufactured the 'news' that Hillary Clinton ran a pizza-restaurant child-sex ring".

Human's seem to want to have control over potential gains and losses, rather than delegating

In Are you a control freak or a delegator? Personality quiz Ben Ambridge reports on research showing that most people want to make their own decisions, even if they know it will cost them more.

This is based on the paper The intrinsic value of choice: The propensity to under-delegate in the face of potential gains and losses by Sebastian Bobadilla-Suarez, Cass R. Sunstein and Tali Sharot. Here's the abstract:

Human beings are often faced with a pervasive problem: whether to make their own decision or to delegate the decision task to someone else. Here, we test whether people are inclined to forgo monetary rewards in order to retain agency when faced with choices that could lead to losses and gains. In a simple choice task, we show that participants choose to pay in order to control their own payoff more than they should if they were to maximize monetary rewards and minimize monetary losses. This tendency cannot be explained by participants’ overconfidence in their own ability, as their perceived ability was elicited and accounted for. Nor can the results be explained by lack of information. Rather, the results seem to reflect an intrinsic value for choice, which emerges in the domain of both gains and of losses. Moreover, our data indicate that participants are aware that they are making suboptimal choices in the normative sense, but do so anyway, presumably for psychological gains.

Common cooking mistakes in Australia

The most common cooking mistakes Australians make - and how to fix them according to Richard Cornish.

Aglio, olio e peperoncino recipe

From Giorgio Locatelli, Made at Home Aglio, olio e peperoncino (garlic, oil and chilli).

World's Best Chocolate Cake?

In Is this chocolate cake recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi's baking cookbook Sweet the world's best? Yotam Ottolenghi provides an interesting chocolate cake recipe from Helen Goh.

Globalisation vs Tribalism

In Lure of globalisation battles our instinctive tribalism Ross Gittins cites the book Choosing Openness by Dr Andrew Leigh in arguing that we tend to have a distrust of outsiders because for most of human history people have lived in small groups of up to 150 people.

Drawing on the work of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, he argues that "for most of history, humans lived in groups of about 150 people" – a figure known as "Dunbar's number".

Such groups were big enough for some specialisation, but small enough for everyone to know and trust everyone else. People were born, mated, hunted and died within their small community.

However, many of us now live in much large communities.

But while hunkering down in the face of difference might have been a useful evolutionary strategy in the past, the growth of cities changed the equation, Leigh argues.

Cities are bound together by not by familial relationships, but by rules and norms of acceptable behaviour.

For hundreds of years, the most productive cities have been those that welcome visitors. In a primitive tribe, a dislike of difference can keep you alive. In a city, it's likely to just make you poorer.

"In this sense, a distrust of diversity is a bit like wisdom teeth – an evolutionary vestige that once helped us grind up plants, but now are more likely to take us on a trip to the dentist's chair."

Gittins and Leigh argue that the some populist politicians stoke our natural distrust of outsiders for political gain.

In a seminal study of the politics of hatred, the Harvard authority on urban economics Edward Glaeser noted that the key to building a powerful coalition around hate is to focus voters' anger on an "out group" that is sufficiently large to be taken seriously as a threat, but too small to be electorally decisive.

They argue that one of the four main drivers of the growth of populism is inequality.

First, slow growth in living standards when the proceeds of economic growth haven't been shared.

"In societies where prosperity is broadly shared, a cosmopolitan outlook steadily replaces traditional values of religion, deference to authority, and an exclusive focus on the security of our family and tribe," he says.

Which foods should be eat of we want to live a long life?

In Which foods can help you live longer? Paula Goodyer reports that long life is just as much about what we eat as our genes.

There is no foolproof recipe for making it to 100 years old and beyond but there are strong clues from longevity hot spots such as the Mediterranean regions of France and Italy, parts of Spain, Nicoya, in Costa Rica, and Okinawa, in Japan. These are all places with high numbers of long-lived people, according to Dr Preston Estep, director of gerontology at the Harvard Personal Genome Project

They do not always eat the same food but their diets have much in common – a lot of plant food, moderate amounts of fish but not so much meat and added sugar, says Estep, whose book, The Mindspan Diet, looks at the eating habits of people who not only live longer but also have lower rates of dementia. Their fat intake varies, but where diets are high in fat it is usually mono-unsaturated fat – the kind found in olive oil, for example. And when they raise a glass, it is usually with meals and in moderation.

So eat mostly vegetables, with plenty of legumes.

Have the benefits of standing desks been oversold

In How the media oversold standing desks as a fix for inactivity at work Catriona Bonfiglioli and Josephine Chau report that articles in the media about the danger of sitting did not accurately reflect the reality of the report they were based on.

Vegetarian Spaghetti Bolognese Recipes

Three vegetarian spaghetti bolognese recipes:

BBC goodfood: Vegetarian spaghetti bolognese

Vegie Num Num: Vegetarian Spaghetti Bolognese

Jamie Oliver: Veggie Spaghetti Bolognese