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The word is out - Acacia will build Australia's NBN

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The winner of the bid to roll out Australia's National Broadband Network has been discovered. Now the fun begins...

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Essay Notes: "Clouds, Clocks, and the Study of Politics" by Gabriel Almond and Stephen Genco

Almond, G. A. & Genco, S. J. (1977). Clouds, Clocks, and the Study of Politics. World Politics, 29(4), 489–522.

Written in 1977, this article considers the scientific turn in political science. Traditionally, political science focused on descriptions of political systems, laws, and history. I have discussed Charles Merriam, founder of the "Chicago School" of political science, in an earlier "journal note". Along with Harold Lasswell, Merriam encouraged greater scientific rigour in political science research. Almond was notably a product of the "Chicago School" of political science, earning his PhD in 1938, the year Harold Lasswell left and two years before Merriam retired. The adoption of the scientific method of the hard (or natural) sciences, which had influenced psychology and economics, and, by this time, was influencing political science, is the subject of this article. Almond and Genco bring to the attention of political scientists the issue of…

Moodle: Higher Ed's Great Open Source Experiment

What is Moodle?
Moodle is an open source educational platform that has a global reach with millions of users worldwide. As part of this open source experiment, many Australian educational institutions have adopted Moodle as their primary Learning Management System (LMS). Unlike proprietary LMS, which tend to be pedagogically neutral, Moodle’s “social constructivist” underpinnings have changed the nature of how education is delivered in these institutions. But is the change for the better?
Open source versus proprietary software
Unlike proprietary or commercial software, "open source" means that the software code is freely available and institutions do not have to pay licence fees based on the number of users. However, institutions pay for support services such as their own (or third-party) help-desks and technicians to implement and manage the software on their servers (whether owned by the institution or controlled by a third party).
In contrast to commercial LMS, Moodle has…

T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land": Pound for Pound

The Waste Land, Prufrock and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After reading Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, the title of which is derived from T.S. Eliot's modernist poem, The Waste Land, I was compelled to read the poem and to learn more about Eliot. Up until today, my knowledge of Eliot was limited to what I had gleaned from Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.
I have read all around Eliot, including Djuna Barnes (whom Eliot admired)1, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Andersen, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf. But I have shied away from poetry until only recently.
After reading the poem, I listened to the BBC's In Our Time podcast episode, "The Waste Land and Modernity". There was much interesting discussion about the original book version of Eliot's poem. Apparently, the poem itself was too short to be a book and the publisher asked Eliot to pad it out.

Eliot added a bunch of notes to the poem, many of whi…

La Chute: Albert Camus on the consequences of not learning to live

The Fall by Albert Camus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the last of Camus' works completed before his death in 1960. First published in 1956, the work is presented as a monologue by Jean-Baptiste Clamence, a Parisian lawyer who has moved to Amsterdam to become a "judge-penitent". I will return to this term later.
Clamence has become bitterly cynical about judges, law, and justice, and has taken to womanising, drinking, and generally driving himself into the ground through hard living. I've read other reviews suggesting the work is Clamence's "confession", for others it is his "self-accusation". The story (it is clearly a philosophical work, rather than a novella) incorporates the stolen panel "The Just Judges" of the Van Eyck painting, The Mythical Lamb (also known as the Ghent altarpiece). The panel was actually stolen in 1934 and is missing to this day.
There are a few other historical references which I found fascinating, inclu…

Le Flâneur Politique by Dr Michael de Percy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://www.politicalscience.com.au.

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Dr Michael de Percy does not guarantee, and accepts no legal liability whatsoever arising from or connected to, the accuracy, reliability, currency or completeness of any material contained on this website or any linked site. Users should seek appropriate independent professional advice prior to relying on, or entering into any commitment based on material published here, which material is purely published for reference purposes alone. All views on this blog are Dr Michael de Percy's personal opinions only, and do not represent the views of any other entity.

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