Friday, March 28, 2008

Location, location II

Where do artists congregate? The clichéd answer is cafés and bars - and doubtless they do go for coffee and drinks. But it turns out that visual artists at least spend a notable amount of time in big hardware stores and the Post Office. Or at least they do in Darwin.

The Creative Tropical City project there has been trying to determine the impact of cultural life in the Northern Territory capital. Chris Gibson, who's actually at the University of Wollongong, used Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology to map the city's creative life. He got the artists to draw their movements on maps and asked them questions about where they live, socialise and work.

What he found surprised him. Artists do use places like bars, galleries and museums (exactly the facilities found in 'creative precincts') but most of their creative epicentres weren't to be found there. Instead, they tended to go to secluded beautiful spots for inspiration, and to Bunnings warehouse and the Post Office for socialisation.

But why? The reasons turn out to be very rational indeed. Bunnings is cheap when it comes to art supplies. The Post Office is where they dispatch their art into competitions. Chris Gibson put it beautifully, "artists spend a lot of their time dealing with bubble wrap."

So artists buying supplies, or sending off their finished works, bump into one another at these locations. They get to have a chat and catch up on the gossip.

It makes perfect sense, but it isn't something I would ever have thought of. To the artists who heard the interview, however, it was no surprise at all. One of them has already said as much on the Life Matters guestbook.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Location, location

I spent a part of my Easter break finishing Richard Florida's Who's Your City. It was very impressive, though this (first) edition is very much aimed at the US market. Put it this way, Sydney gets two mentions while Madison, Wisconsin, (a much smaller place that's home to an excellent university but not a lot else) gets 11.

Essentially, Florida's thesis is that where you live matters a great deal. So much so that it's one of the three most important decisions you'll ever make: up there with who you choose to spend your life with, and what you do. Actually, Florida argues that it's the key decision - because it affects the other two.

He's got a point. Holiday romances aside, you tend to meet the person you fall for in the place that you live. Actually you tend to meet them through the places where you socialise, and - overwhelmingly - where you work. You tend to find a job in the place where you live too, although many of us know people who moved for love or their career, or both.

So place matters to you and me. But it also matters to economists and politicians and planners because cities are the great engine rooms of the world economy. Indeed, Florida has identified 40 mega-regions in the world that are home to 1.5 billion people. That's a lot of people - 18% of the world's population - but they're responsible for 66% of economic activity and a staggering 86% of patented innovations.

Mega-regions are very important and very big. Bigger than cities, most of the time anyway. Tokyo and London each get one to themselves, as does Mexico City. But most have cities as mere components. Bos-Wash - the almost completely built-up connurbation that stretches down the US eastern seaboard from Boston to Washington, DC, gives you the flavour of the thing. Australia does not get a single guernsey here - not Sydney, not Melbourne, not Syd-Melb, not anything. We're not big enough.

There's a lot in the book about this kind of thing - cities and regions as cradles for innovation and economic drivers which are becoming increasingly specialised. Cities as winners (LA, San Francisco, Nashville) and cities as losers (St Louis, Pittsburgh). Cities on the up (Shanghei) and on the down (Detroit). I find it fascinating.

But all this is just building up Richard Florida's bona fides. His real message is that different places have different strengths, weaknesses and personalities. (New York is the most neurotic part of America - I love that). Furthermore, people want different things from where they live in different stages of their life. Bars and music venues are much more important to young, single people just out of uni than they are to young families. At each stage, there's a place that's good for you.

Actually, Florida goes a bit further than that. Really, he believes, we should be mobile and move to the place that suits us best. He doesn't pretend there aren't costs involved with doing that - not least the separation from friends and family. Florida also makes clear that no place is perfect and individuals always need to make trade-offs. However, America is not just a land of optimists, it's the land of starting over. Bet it sells like hot cakes.

Certainly I found it an interesting and provocative set of ideas. Hopefully it was a good interview too.

Easter regs

Easter is about family, food and church. Or it should be. This year, we didn't go away, which meant less stress, less driving and less expense. Interestingly, the ACCC says that petrol prices over Easter weren't a rip-off. It just felt like they were.

With only normal amounts of weekend driving, it didn't matter anyway. And of course there was too much food, too much wine, too much chocolate and just the right amounts of friends and church. I could get used to these four day weekends.


All of which leaves me in agreement with the perceptive Peter Martin when he writes about how important these little breaks are. If only he wouldn't ruin it by firstly blogging over the weekend, and then going on Meet the Press!

Friday, March 21, 2008

Liar, Liar II

A week or so ago I wrote about the work of Victoria Talwar at McGill University - who's been looking at lying in young children. The other day I got to follow up my conversation with her by talking to another expert on lying - Nancy Darling.

Nancy is at Oberlin College in Ohio and her work is all about the psychology of adolescence - it's fascinating. Teenagers lie for exactly the same reasons as the rest of us, to gain some advantage for themselves or others, or to mitigate a disadvantage. So far, so predictable.

But adolescents are trying to carve out their own identities, so they're looking for autonomy and chafing against parental authority. That drive peaks at 14-15, but it's stronger at 11 than it is 18. That's the first thing.

The second thing is how bad parents are at detecting lies. They only get it right 60% of the time. So four lies in 10 won't be spotted. But it works the other way too. The mothers (and it's overwhelmingly mothers) will only believe the kids are telling the truth six times out of 10. That's six times out of 10 truths. All of which means that parents clearly expect their adolescent children to lie but they're not very good at detecting the porkies when they do.

This very much informs the decisions the teenagers have to make when it comes to managing their parents. If they want to do things their parents would rather they didn't do, (all the good stuff, from the teen's perspective), they have two options. Lie about what they're up to, who they're with, where they're going and what they're wearing. Or, tell their parents, fight with them and (most of the time) lose. Understandably, it's not a difficult decision.

The key is how parents choose to deal with their adolescents. Nancy Darling has found that many parents are permissive and that their rationale is that the kids will be less likely to rebel in a spectacular fashion, and more likely to tell them the truth.

The only trouble is, this doesn't work. These parents don't know any more about the lives of their teenagers than other, stricter, mums and dads. They get told just as many lies.

But being obsessively strict doesn't work either. Firstly it's very difficult to pull off - it takes ridiculous amounts of energy and determination to enforce a lot of rules and subject the kids to the third degree. Secondly, the effect it has is to make the children depressed. They are obedient (which is probably what the parents were going for) but they're really depressed. Not so good.

There is, however, a happy medium - a kind of 'Goldilocks' approach. The parents who set a few rules about what they considered really important, made it clear they expect those rules to be adhered to, but also allowed their kids autonomy on other issues, did much better. They certainly knew more about their children's lives and the kids didn't tell them as many lies.

It sounds wonderful, doesn't it? But there's a cost and it goes back to the choice I mentioned earlier - the decision teens have to make when it comes to doing what they want and managing their parents. There are more fights and those fights are more demanding.

Tabitha Holmes of SUNY has looked at how both parents (mothers) and their kids feel about these fights. The mothers find them chaotic, exhausting and difficult. As Nancy Darling, herself a mother of teenagers told me, 'adolescents are really good at arguing'. So that's the parents. The teens thought the clashes made their relationships stronger. There's more fighting, less lying and a stronger relationship.

So what's the take home message? Set some reasonable rules and fight the good fight.

Thursday, March 20, 2008

Elites vs Excellence

Part of me wonders if this isn't a debate over semantics, but the ideas canvassed are well worth thinking about. It's from Tuesday's Guardian and it goes to culture, as much as education. It's also an argument that we'll hear more of here - the land of cutting down Tall Poppies.

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Why Great Unis Matter

It occurs to me I haven't explained why it's important to have more very good universities. The answer lies in one of the consequences of very large numbers. Michael Kremer of Harvard University has shown that the rate of technological progress is proportional to population. Essentially, the more people you have, the more brilliant ideas they come up with. Not only that, but those brilliant ideas move through those populations remarkably quickly.

Australia has a small population. Fundamentally, and even in the most extreme scenarios, that is not going to change in the next 40 years or so.
UN population projections show that even if we had, say 36 million people, by 2050 we will still be dwarfed - and not only by India (1.458 billion) and China (1.181 billion). The US will have 437 million, Nigeria: 302 million, Uganda: 167 million and Yemen: 144 million.

In our region, in addition to the megagiants, we'll be dealing with Pakistan (409 million), Indonesia (273 million), Bangladesh (260 million), the Philippines (129 million), Vietnam (110 million) and Thailand (70 million). Earlier I said, even if we had 36 million we'd be dwarfed. But the overwhelming likelihood is that we'll have 10 million fewer - 26 million people. Population-wise, we're heading for the same level of relevance as New Zealand (4 million), and as
Coral Bell has pointed out, this is going to present a rather testing set of challenges for us.

It would help our rather small country if it is also an extremely clever one. We can't rely on sheer brute numbers to generate brilliant ideas, so we need to have more brilliant people - more proportionally than all the others I've mentioned (except New Zealand) - if we are to compete and prosper.

Extremely good universities are key to getting them. They attract very bright people from overseas to study and work here. They train the very bright people we've grown ourselves. The best universities also generate valuable intellectual property, which can be commercialised by entrepreneurs, as well as 'pure' knowledge that tells us more about our world and ourselves. This generates a virtuous circle - the innovation and the ideas attract the people, and the people contribute more innovation and ideas.


But I think, in a way, the IP is the less important, it's the people that really matter. McKinseys was right - there really is a War for Talent. But it's not just happening at the level of the corporation, countries are in it too. As a small country, we need to be a winner and our universities will be vital in making us one.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Uni study

At the end of last week, Julia Gillard, the Education Minister announced a review of the higher education sector. It will be chaired by Denise Bradley, the former vice-chancellor of the University of South Australia, and report by the end of the year. She is going to need to get cracking.

Australian universities are still good.
One or two are very good - they make the top 100 in the world according to the best regarded of the ranking systems. But they're not great - they aren't of the calibre of Harvard, UC Berkeley, MIT, Chicago or Oxford. Realistically they're not in the next tier down either, with the likes of Wisconsin, Johns Hopkins, Tokyo, or Imperial College in London.

They are not in the tier below that either. The ANU is ranked 57 (its highest rank was 49), Melbourne is at 79 - which puts it below Sheffield, Arizona and Case Western Reserve. That's the context, or part of it.

The scarier* part is that all the OECD countries, well nearly all, have been shovelling money into universities while the previous Coalition government did not. Mostly, they were neglected, sometimes they were thrown a bone or two. The OECD figures on this are unequivocal and I say that as someone who's had to sit through discussions between the then Education Minister Julie Bishop and her then shadow, Stephen Smith. Oh. My. God.

The thing is, the last government didn't really like the universities. It thought they were full of 'elites'. It suspected the uni folk were a bunch of lefties who liked Paul Keating. John Howard defined himself as the common man (the fact that he was completely uncommon in his ambition, work ethic, intelligence and political nous is beside the point). His government correctly calculated that most people thought the unis were full of smart-arses and that not shovelling large quantities of money into them wouldn't lose any votes.

But this new government has as Prime Minister a policy wonk. We know that he's very clever indeed and it's part of his appeal. We like thinking that this clever man is looking after the country. You would think he might have a bit more sympatico when it comes to the universities, even if there aren't many votes in it.

I think you'd be right. Here's a prediction: the review will report that the unis need a lot more money if Australia's going to compete in an increasingly knowledge-based global economy. Here's another prediction: the universities, for their part, will accept that they can't be all things to all students and specialise. A big chunk of the 38 of them will agree to concentrate on teaching. A smaller chunk will trundle on doing a bit of teaching and a bit of research - but will concentrate their efforts on their strengths. The
Group of Eight will agree to specialise a bit more too and in return receive even more of the research funding.

And then, barring complete global financial disaster (not assured), in next year's budget the government will allocate some meaningful money. The vast majority of which will be delivered in its second and third terms.

The universities, which would rather have jam now, will accept that more jam tomorrow is better than no jam at all.

(*The really scary part is how much money China is investing in its universities and research infrastructure. Of which, more another time)

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Vale, the Big Man

I was going to write about the government's decision to have another look (the first for a long time) at Australia's university system. This is a good thing, a very good thing, but I'll come back to it another time because Peter Cullen is dead.

This is a bad thing, a very bad thing, because Peter Cullen was our pre-eminent voice on sustainable water policy in this dry country. There are other important academics with things to say about the environment, but Professor Cullen was a freshwater specialist - he knew about catchments, lakes, rivers and environmental flows.

He spoke more good sense about them than anyone else. His great ability was to be straightforward and understandable about vast and complex systems, which are out of sight of most Australians, and vital to our future. It's that last bit that he could get across. He could engage with anyone, even children, but more importantly, politicians.

He was a member of the
Wentworth Group and its leading light. He was a National Water Commissioner. He was on the inside, which is just where we needed him.

Water is a fractious, difficult and very political issue in this country but the drought, the public's position on climate change and the Rudd Labor government's mandate meant that his influence was growing.

The people who loved him will miss him the most but all of us will miss his immense
contribution. And all of us should hope that someone else can build on his work.

Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Talkin' 'bout a Revolution

At the beginning of last year, almost 10 months to the day before he was elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd called for an education revolution.

More than 100 days in to the new government and we don't really know what that will mean. Labor has committed to making sure every school student in Year 9 and above will have access to a computer. Cost: $1 billion.

The ALP's also promised to spend half a billion providing trades training centres in schools by the end of the year. And $2.5 billion over 10 years.

And there's a shade under another half a billion, $489 million, so that schools can install solar power.

I could go on. But I won't because here's the thing. The government is making cuts, it's making noises about its first budget being tough. It will certainly be tough on some education programs, the ones introduced by the Howard government.

Summer School for teachers is cactus. Not only did Labor never like it, but killing it claws back $70 million and has no political downside. It's gone.

Teaching Australia - probably gone. Its job is to promote professionalism and standards but the state registration boards already do this.

Literacy and numeracy vouchers - not looking too well. This program provides $700 worth of tuition for struggling kids in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Doesn't sound much but it adds up to real money - $380 million or so over the next three years. However, at the moment there isn't a lot of take-up, partly because unless you live in the right areas, you will struggle to find a good enough tutor. And partly because the rates good tutors charge mean $700 barely gets you started.

The Howard government had an idealogical affinity with the vouchers but Labor doesn't. It's another idea the ALP criticised at the time and another one it can ditch with almost no downside, as long as it puts the money saved into schools.

As for the "Education Revolution", the computers will get plugged in, probably. It's a good fit with Labor's emphasis on broadband and a good idea too. As in most things, the devil will be in the detail. And unless that detail includes substantial IT training for teachers - most of whom have very limited knowledge and skills - it's going to be a fizzer.

The other education proposals Labor has may not survive the tough Budget process, or at least, not in the same timeframes.


Sunday, March 9, 2008

Liar, liar

Kids lie all the time. And the smarter they are, the better they do it. Not only that, we facilitate this as parents. We encourage it, they learn it from us.

These are some of the fascinating conclusions from
Victoria Talwar's research team at McGill University in Canada. I read about them in Po Bronson's terrific article for the New York Times magazine.

Actually, how I came to read it is revealing in terms of how people pass information around. My brother in law, a single man with no children who lives on the other side of the world, read it. He sent the link to his sister, my wife, because he thought she'd be interested. (I am not sure what this says about my children) She was, but she thought I would be too. I printed it - I'm too much of a digital immigrant to read long documents on a screen - and there it sat on my desk for two weeks. Eventually I read it.

The upshot of all this was a hurried email conversation with Victoria Talwar, then en route to a conference, and an agreement that I'd interview her early on Tuesday morning my time.

In the meantime, I am trying, with only some success, not to put my kids in a position where lying is easier than telling the truth.