Instead of Hemingway's iceberg, think Gabriel's peephole...

Steamers on the Magdalena River.  Photo: Clímaco Calderón (1852-1913), Wikimedia, Public Domain.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

After powering through two books per week while on long service leave, back at work and teaching and applying for research grants and my literary luxury is thrown out with the bathwater. It has taken me six weeks to finish one book, and it deserved a more settled reading. Last night I realised there was less than half a page to go and I felt an overwhelming sadness and as I read the conclusion, I was at a loss. Can life and loving really be like that where it all turns out in the end? Or does the Disney gloss of undying love hide the protagonist's sinful deception sufficiently? To say I wasn't hooked would be a lie. There are so many things that Márquez puts into writing what people actually do but would die of embarrassment if they knew that others knew they knew. I found this enlightening because nobody else talks about such things. Of course, I am too embarrassed to talk about the things I mean, so it is better to leave one guessing. Márquez, at least, could always say that his work was fiction and he imagined such things, but I don't think so. He was 58 when this work was published. For once, I do not feel like I am behind the eight-ball. Not in terms of receiving the Nobel Prize, but in terms of living and loving and knowing. I have been listening to a podcast by Bryant Davis recently, entitled The Joy of Serious Literature. It is everything I ever wanted in a podcast. Something quirky, something different. So far, the podcast points to several non-traditional and non-white literary works that will certainly take me out of my comfort zone. Márquez certainly did that, but rather than freaking me out like Japanese adult manga might do, but there it is explicit, whereas Márquez drops thought grenades and leaves the reader to clean up the mess. When Florentino Ariza is resting in the brothel, I daresay the reader's imagination will be trying to see what is going on in the background. Rather than Hemingway's iceberg, think of Gabriel's peephole. But don't tell anyone. It's very powerful. And I do believe the conclusion left me with a Spanish version of saudade.

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Video: The Week in Politics with Michelle Grattan and Michael de Percy

AAP/Lukas Coch

VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the dual citizenship cases in the High Court

Michelle Grattan, University of Canberra and Michael de Percy, University of Canberra

The University of Canberra’s Michelle Grattan and Michael de Percy discuss the week in politics, including the High Court date for the dual citizenship cases, whether Barnaby Joyce and Fiona Nash should stand aside from their ministerial duties, the early signs for the same-sex marriage postal vote, Labor’s campaign on inequality, Bill Shorten being targeted as a socialist, and whether Australia would assist the US in Afghanistan.

Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra and Michael de Percy, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, University of Canberra

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Road Reform: My Latest on "The Conversation"

The majority of working Australians drive to and from work. AAP/Dan Himbrechts

Getting serious on roads reform is one way our political leaders can get back on track

Michael de Percy, University of Canberra

Structural economic reform is hardly the stuff of epic election campaigns. But tax reform, including some form of road user charging, is well overdue for Australia.

Road user charging will involve a shake-up of all road-related revenues and how we pay for and use our roads and transport infrastructure. This will require federal leadership and the agreement of the states and territories. The Commonwealth’s fuel excise and the states’ and territories’ car registration fees will be affected.

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Further reading: Road user charging belongs on the political agenda as the best answer for congestion management

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The road to reform

The Commonwealth’s fuel excise is obsolete. Despite the reintroduction of indexation, the fuel excise revenue base is steadily declining and will eventually disappear.

Fuel excise is obsolete because fuel-efficient and electric vehicles use less fuel. It is also unfair, because people who can afford the latest Tesla cars will pay nothing in fuel excise. And it does not signal market demand for, or go directly back into, building and maintaining transport infrastructure.

The contribution of fuel excise to road-related budget revenue is shrinking. (A$‘000s in 2015 prices) BITRE

Also, the fuel excise provides a perverse incentive by encouraging motorists with fuel-efficient cars to drive more. However, road user charging incentivises behavioural change that can help reduce traffic congestion.

The typical urban worker commutes for about one hour each work day, and time spent commuting is rising. The majority of working Australians drive to and from work. Australians are not getting any healthier, and longer commuting times are at least part of the problem.

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Further reading: What’s equity got to do with health in a higher-density city?

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If we do nothing, traffic congestion in capital cities is expected to cost A$53.3 billion by 2031 – or 290% more than it did in 2011.

Some argue that “peak car” will save the day. But per-capita car ownership figures mean nothing if the number of actual cars isn’t reduced. Driverless cars may even make things worse.

Why it’s been difficult to achieve

The reality is that roads are the “least reformed of all infrastructure sectors”. And roads, according to competition expert Ian Harper, are the:

… only example of an infrastructure asset, where the government owns the great bulk of the asset, funded through the tax system and given away for nothing.

So, why is road reform so hard?

Road pricing is long overdue and it’s happening elsewhere. But it’s as big as the GST, and it could prove to be just as unpalatable.

Truckies already pay for their use of the roads, and moves are afoot to increase the charges to more accurately cover the cost of the damage trucks do to the roads.

This is supported by the railways, which have effectively cross-subsidised trucks ever since the truckies stopped cross-subsidising them. But politicians are reluctant to tackle road pricing for private cars because motorists don’t like the idea.

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Further reading: Trucks are destroying our roads and not picking up the repair cost

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There has at least been some movement. Urban Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher announced in 2016 that an eminent Australian will conduct a study into the impact of road user charging for light vehicles.

What reform did for Hawke and Howard

The recent Democracy100 event at Old Parliament House was held in response to mounting dismay at the state of today’s politics. Speaking at the event, former prime ministers Bob Hawke and John Howard recommended a bipartisan approach. Focusing on key reforms to “rejuvenate the economy”, like roads reform, would do the trick.

While that may sound uninspiring, Howard observed that public esteem for politicians “has fallen in a time when there’s not been major reform”.

Howard and Hawke are two of the top three longest-serving prime ministers in Australian history. Both are living proof that major reform agendas can win elections. Howard oversaw the introduction of the “never-ever” GST; Hawke set the stage by undoing protectionism and dragging Australia into a global market economy.

And what do we have to lose? It’s clear self-centred professional politics isn’t working.

Australians expect parliament to do the hard work of reform, instead of playing dress-up and acting for the cameras. And history shows voters reward that hard work with electoral success.

Michael de Percy, Senior Lecturer in Political Science, University of Canberra

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Pedagogical Evolution: A Personal Journey

It was more than one hundred years later before corporal punishment was banned in Queensland state schools. Cartoon: Wikimedia Commons [Public Domain].

My teaching philosophy hasn't changed for over a decade. I find it a bit wordy these days, but it has stood the test of time. Until they started talking about killer robots, that is. It's time for a rethink.

When I was growing up in Queensland, we used to get the cane. The first time was in 1982. I bounced a ball at "little lunch". Because, during recess, we weren't allowed to play. One cut on the left hand. And the pompous clown who made a great ceremony out of writing it all down in his grand book. Seriously. Then I remember one kid in grade 6 was whipped with the aluminium handle of a feather duster. No ceremony at all, just whack-whack-whack-whack-whack. The back of his legs came up in black and blue welts. This was a state school in the early eighties, and it kept happening up until 1985. It was the last time and I got six of the best on each hand. We used to call it "getting the cuts" or "six of the best" and usually on both hands, one after the other. They even had a theory for its use in education.

Then in 1986 something changed. By then I was in year 11, so it didn't apply to me anymore but the world changed almost overnight. Legally it didn't change until 1995, but in practice it never happened to me again after 1985. I hated school so much the 20th November 1987, my last day of school, was the only day I didn't wag it and I wore my school uniform properly for the first time. I didn't realise how much I hated everything about school except the music block and a handful of teachers who I still call friends.

And then I was free.

University is so much better. You can be yourself, or someone else, or somebody new, or anything you want. But there is no longer any system to buck. I mean, there is still a system, but you can walk away from it any time you like. I always challenged myself, and I studied everything the exact opposite of what I thought I believed. Feminism, gender politics, left-wing, post-modernism, conservative, liberal, libertarian, you name it. There was a whole world out there to discover. And I discovered that most of the stuff I had learnt as a kid was rot. It was all about how I should behave to make others happy and it was all based on the same old boring world view that would have me bust a gut for some other clown.

False consciousness was never for me. University taught me how to comprehend, combat, and even turn it on its head to my advantage. I always say that a university degree proves that you can successfully navigate through bureaucracy. Just watch your grandmother try to fill out a Centrelink form and you will know exactly what I mean.

But there were so many great people who encouraged me along the way. I don't remember a single lecturer who was bad. Not one. I used to dream about doing my PhD and being supervised by one particular professor who wrote many of my textbooks in my early undergrad political science degree. I was living in Brisbane and had just left the military at the time. Years later it actually happened. Since, I have met and sometimes even worked with some of the great names in political science. And not just Australian political scientists.

I read and read and read and do almost nothing else and I write and write and read and read and deliberately take time to think and reflect and yet it will be years before I can match what these great professors know and can do. But by reading and writing and thinking and reflecting and discussing and debating and adopting a scholarly attitude to my work I hope to emulate what I see in those who have been before.

But there is a strong class element to education. Sometimes it is like you are being held back by those around you, other times those who have the appearance of being above you try to keep you down. But not always. The idea of having a "chip on one's shoulder" in the Cambridge dictionary uses this example: "He's got a chip on his shoulder about not having been to university". I worked and studied full time for years, just as many of you are trying to do, and it sucks big time. I had one six month period after I left the military where I studied full time and used up my superannuation (back in the day when you could). All HDs but then I was out of money and I had two kids and a mortgage and so it was back to work.

These days I realise that almost everybody has to do this to get a university degree. At the time I thought the silver-tails all had it easy. And some of them do. But these days I focus on what matters to me, and life is simpler and more pleasant than ever. But I love my work. I hope I can provide opportunities for those who otherwise wouldn't have them and I hope that I can inspire even one person in the way that my own lecturers inspired me. But then the world changed again.

Social media was going to save the world and then it did the opposite. Now we are talking about stuff that Isaac Asimov was making up years ago but now it is actually happening. I mean, Elon Musk is leading a bunch of experts to ban killer robots. Did I fall asleep and wake up in a movie?

I think we agree. The past is over (George W. Bush, 2000). 

The future is here. Gunning buffers me from the worst of it, but I still have to interact with this brave new world, even if I am the slave whipping myself on the hill while the helicopters circle around me. I have to adapt.

My biggest issue is that I think a great books education is the best way to learn the liberal arts. When I assessed my teaching style years ago, I was an awkward blend of liberal arts, where the Socratic method is supreme and the lecturer is the expert, and radical education. I like to think this is why I try to read the great books but I also blog and have built a reputation as a teaching and learning innovator.

But I have been struggling with the changes. I still think the essay is the best way to learn how to think. But unless a student intends to be an academic, then the traditional system might not be the best approach. Sure, writing is important, but what about writing an op ed for a website, where the piece is around 800 words with links and so on. It is still referenced, the quality of the research is still important, and it requires a particular writing style. Surely that can be academic in its own right?

And then on 27 June 2015 I subscribed to Ryan Holiday's reading list email. I think it was via the Art of Manliness, one of my favourite podcasts and websites. It seemed a bit random but every now and then I'd receive an email with a list of books this bloke had read. And I started reading some of these books. And then I started learning more about him and then reading his books and then learning about Stoicism and then thinking how the hell did this lad who was born at the same time I finished high school get it?

And it's the reading, and the thinking, and the reflecting, and the learning. But he puts the old and the new together in a way that I try to do. If he didn't read I couldn't trust him. He is surely a poodle-faker, but poodle-faking is a skill. And so here I am, and it is probably time to update my teaching philosophy. But not yet.

Workshop: Researching the History of Your House @Gunning Library

Keswick, Gunning. Built 1926 by F.J. Caldwell

Tomorrow I am running a free community workshop at the Gunning Library from 2pm until 4pm. The workshop will cover the use of Six Maps, the Historical Land Records Viewer, and Trove. 

I became interested in the history of our house, Keswick, and spent many late nights discovering all the wonderful things about Gunning and especially our home. Eventually, I found the article below on Trove, which puts the approval of the plans at 8th June 1926. 

This was later confirmed when we were renovating and we uncovered a signature, "F.J. Caldwell 1926", confirming the build date.

The plans for Keswick were approved by the Gunning Shire Council on 8 June 1926

I met many others who were interested in local and family history and I asked the Gunning Library if they were interested in community workshops using the many wonderful public resources we have such as the National Library of Australia's Trove, the National Archives of Australia and the Australian War Memorial records, and now I delve into Six Maps and the Historical Land Records Viewer.

To date, we have had a full house at the first two events and apparently we are booked out for tomorrow's, too. If anyone would like to attend a future workshop, please let the Gunning Library know. I aim to run at least two workshops per year.

Gunning Public Library: Officially opened on Friday 17 July 1925 as the Gunning Centenary Literary Institute, albeit some three years after the centenary. At the opening, Sir Austin Chapman, MHR from Eden-Monaro took the opportunity to criticise the Victoria Government over their opposition to the location of Canberra. Photo CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia/@Mattinbgn

Sovereign Risk? East West Link versus Adani

East West Link Protesters, 4 May 2014. Photo by Takver @Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Sovereign risk is where, for example, a business enters into a contract with a national government, and then the government changes its mind and ends the contract. Typically, governments would then pay compensation to the business to ameliorate the costs of responding to a government request, organising resources to meet the contract, and then losing the contract. This is very real sovereign risk and it happened in Victoria in 2015 when the East-West Link contract was cancelled. The costs to the Victorian Government soon began to mount.

But it didn't end there. Victorians had to pay even more. And there was the social cost of compulsorily acquiring homes, only to sell them back some time later to recoup costs.

If you were the business owner, you would expect compensation, and you might be wary of future contracts with government. Indeed, the Andrews Government's decision to end the contract received official complaints from the French and Spanish ambassadors.

If a government develops a reputation of being "risky", then future contracts will cost more, and compensation clauses will become heftier. This is sovereign risk and the ways that companies ameliorate that risk, just like the insurance industry would do.

Imagine you were the homeowner who did not want to leave, but were forced to do so, only to see your home later sold to someone else. Or else you saw an opportunity to use the properties for low-income housing, but instead these were auctioned off to cover the costs of compensation.

The point is, here we have all the hallmarks of sovereign risk and the political, financial, and social fallout that accompanies that risk.

But what about Adani's claim that Australia is gaining a reputation for an unacceptable level of sovereign risk? Is sovereign risk created when the government won't give you a loan of almost $1bn?

I don't think so.

Introducing Government-Business Relations: or, Capitalism 101

A model of capitalism. Adapted from Stilwell (2006, p. 49)

I have been teaching an introductory course in government-business relations for many years. This semester is the last time I will be teaching it. In future, I will be teaching a third year courses in political economy and political leadership. I had to make a podcast of a recent lecture after the audio recording failed, so here it is for your listening pleasure via Soundcloud or Stitcher.

Sky Muster is Coming: Whither ADSL?

Photo Credit: Pixabay CC0

In the village of Gunning, about one hour's drive north of the national capital, Sky Muster^TM has arrived. But rumours abound that if you are not already connected to the existing copper network, then Sky Muster^TM is your only option.

These rumours were reported recently in the Gunning News section in the Goulburn Post, with a request for clarification.

The problem is, if you are on ADSL, you can get 1,000 gigabytes of download for about $120 per month. But on Sky Muster,^TM  customers are typically paying around $159/month for 60GB download.

In a letter to the editor yesterday, and in response to the community's concerns, National's Senator for NSW and Minister for Regional Communications, the Hon Fiona Nash, pointed out that from October this year, customers will be able to receive "100 gigabytes a month of peak data and 150 gigabytes of off-peak data for around $120". This is a far cry from the 1,000 gigabytes ADSL customers can access.

My ADSL usage since April 2017

I have used over 120 gigabytes of my ADSL service only once so far this year, and my average monthly usage has been around 106 gigabytes (see left).

But that is only for two people who both work. If my kids were still at home, then a Sky Muster^TM plan wouldn't keep pace with our broadband demand.

The lack of choice and the non-answering of legitimate questions has been my issue with NBN all along.

Back on 7 April 2009, on ABC's Unleashed (which later became the now-defunct The Drum website) I wrote about the plans to roll out the NBN. I warned that government needed to end "business as usual" and engage with citizens. In particular, I warned that:

In Australia, the historical legacies of centrally-controlled communications policy make it difficult for local solutions to address peculiar local communications problems... [Further,]

If the government is going to invest in the infrastructure, why must it be spent on one solution? [...and]

At the Regional Telecommunications Independent Review Committee in Sydney... [in 2009], the participants represented a range of rural and community groups. They presented stories about how local efforts were simply overlooked and how they were regarded as 'fools' by authorities and other 'people in the know' when they complained about specific communications problems in their local areas. 

Fast-forward eight years, and what do we have? A single solution that appears to be regressive: if you are in the village and on Sky Muster,^TM your service, despite billions of dollars of taxpayers money already spent, may well be worse than what was previously available.

But we can only guess because we do not have the facts: if you build within the village limits in places like Gunning, do you have no other option but to go to  Sky Muster^TM? Is this true, or isn't it? Why can't we be told?

Again, in 2009, I wrote:

Rather than bringing the infrastructure closer to the people, the secrecy over the NBN to date has simply been more of the same. 

The Minister's letter yesterday does not answer the question posed by the Gunning community. Her response is to state that the service will be improved. This is great, but will it be better than the current ADSL service? I don't think so.

Later in 2009, I also wrote:

The broadband reform consultation provides a major opportunity to fix a problem which has plagued Australia for decades.

But it would seem we have slipped right back into the old ways, where telecommunications is a big policy lever to be pulled whenever political parties want to have a go at each other, or when there is need for a new announcement. Indeed, the Minister's response to the village's questions provided an opportunity to have a go at the Opposition with no answers forthcoming. Clearly, NBN remains a political football.

In almost every other country I have visited, if you are prepared to pay, you can get the services you want. But in Australia, the central control model of "doing" telecommunications policy often leaves consumers with limited choices, regardless of how much you are prepared to pay. After decades of market reforms, we haven't progressed all that far in telecommunications, especially in "the bush".

But to have to use billions of dollars in taxpayers money to actually reduce the existing services seems absurd. Some clarity from our political representatives on this problem would be welcomed by many in regional and remote areas who may not be getting what they have already paid for.

When I first started my research into telecommunications policy outcomes, I was interested to know why Canada was so far ahead of Australia. My findings were that the divergent outcomes were the result of historical processes and ways of "doing" telecommunications policy.

Despite my research, many others were convinced it was simply a matter of time and effort and Australia would catch up. Let's have a look. Here's how it was in 2002:

OECD Fixed Line Broadband Statistics 2002. Source: OECD (2003: 173) Telecommunications Outlook 2003

And here is the same graph for December 2016. It must be noted that only smaller countries have surpassed Canada's early leadership:

Source: OECD Broadband Portal

Did Canadians spend billions on a government-controlled monolith? No. And the difference in speeds has been a persistent issue in Canada's favour, too.

Surely Australian citizens have a right to ask, has it all been worth it? and, Are we getting what we paid for?

Book Notes: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" by James Fitzjames Stephen

Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 1st Baronet, KCSI (3 March 1829 – 11 March 1894). Photos via Wikimedia [Public Domain]

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity by James Fitzjames Stephen

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I discovered this book while reading something about Mill. It was a critique of Mill's On Liberty and it presents a number of arguments that are hard to fault, but also a number of arguments that, if spoken today, would require endless apologies and may even require a politician to step down from office. Nevertheless, Stephen was a lawyer (and later a notable judge) and at times he could be verbose, at other times insightful, at still others rather strange. Yet his critique of Mill leaves me with plenty of food for thought. He argues in the same way I have listened to conservatives argue against a Bill of Rights for Australia. There is a modicum of liberalism in the English sense of the word, and I might be presumptuous and say in a similar vein to Edmund Burke. When I read Mill, I felt like I was reading my own education in summary. When I read Stephen, I feel like I am getting an education. Some suggest that Liberty, Equality, Fraternity was James Fitzjames Stephen's masterpiece, and apparently Oxford is reproducing his works in several volumes. Stephen didn't disagree with utilitarianism nor liberalism, but he did disagree with the extremes of liberalism that Mill advocated, and especially against the emancipation of women as outlined in Mill's On the Subjection of Women. Stephen's arguments were deeply rooted in his conception of the evidence observed in nature, rather than an idealism as characterised by Mill. Yet Stephen's conclusion displays another form of idealism, and I couldn't help thinking that it was a rather weak way of summing up, rather like an undergraduate essay that lost its argument and tries to finish in an upbeat fashion. Yet there were many lessons to be gleaned from Stephen, and the Liberty Fund's inclusion of this work as an important contribution is well-founded, despite history's favouring Mill. I must admit that it took me a while to get through this, and the combination of wordy ideas and arguments, along with rather fine print, made this somewhat of an exercise in discipline rather than enlightenment. And I am all the wiser for doing so.

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How do I podcast?

My new podcast logo, based on an oil pastel on paper work by Margarita Georgiadis.

After spending my sabbatical on reading and thinking about my research philosophy and trying to find a unifying principle for my work, I arrived at 'the concept of le flâneur politique becomes my "vehicle for the examination of the conditions of modernity"' (Walter Benjamin). In effect, I could be in the world but not of it. 

I didn't want to be a political scientist of the left or the right - these concepts are rigid and they are not reflected in the variety of arrangements that would otherwise be possible. I wrote about this recently. 

So once I had settled on the concept of one who wanders through the arcades of life to observe and understand, it enabled me to find connections in my research, teaching, and reading interests. I like the idea of the old, like federation houses and open fireplaces, but I also like blogging and radio and podcasts. 

"Le flâneur politique" gave me a kind of "steampunk" freedom to mix and match the past and the future and "straddle" the best of both worlds.

I've been blogging regularly for ten years this year. I have also presented a radio program on community radio for about the same length of time, although since I moved out to Gunning I haven't done a show. I have promised to provide a pre-recorded show but to date it hasn't happened. But that may change soon.

I decided to start a podcast show. I didn't know where to start but I liked the idea of Stitcher, which I have been using for a while as I commute to Canberra. Podcasts have opened up a whole new world to me and the commute is an exciting part of my day. It is certainly never dull.

I thought, too, that if I could get the podcast setup right, I could also record my radio show and then get back into it regularly. I started with the microphone for my digital camera. It is a Rode Stereo VideoMic. Not ideal for podcasts, but good quality recording for now.

Microphone solved. Next was the recording software. I tried a bunch of different apps on my Alienware 15 R3. It really is the best thing ever. In the end, I settled back with Audacity with the LAME MP3 converter. I'd used it a while back when making video lectures but it has been a while.

Then I went looking for some music. The Free Music Archive (FMA) provides music licenced through Creative Commons. My blog is CC BY-NC-SA 2.5 AU so this worked well. FMA has a good range of music and I will use it as my "go to" site for now.

But I also found an interesting sound effects site, AR Sound Effects, which is licenced using Creative Commons, but with a CC BY licence which can be used for anything as long as you attribute the work to the creator.

This site is really cool. It took me a while to work out how to convert YouTube videos to mp3 files, but the aptly-named YouTube mp3 did the job no problems. 

Next was to work out something to say and to test it all. I made a couple of false starts, but there was some media training happening nearby so I reflected on that and began recording. The first thing I noticed was that I had to get the Audacity setup right. I needed to hear what I was saying and hear the music and sound effects at the same time.

And here was the first big problem that I can only solve with a new microphone. Latency. When you listen to the playback through Audacity, there is a lag between you speaking and you hearing what you are saying, I had some marching feet sound effects and I was trying to speak to the beat. But it came so slow through the microphone that I started slowing down my voice and the recording sounded terrible. 

I solved it by listening to the sound effect through my headphones and speaking without hearing my voice. I felt like I was Geoffrey Rush's patient on The King's Speech, except I wasn't the king, I was just some charity case:

This is the problem with digital recording. Given all our technological advances of late it seems rather lame that we don't have a digital solution to a problem that going analogue would solve!

So I will look to microphones. I probably need two to do interviews, so a I will have to investigate whether a USB podcast microphone will work, or whether I need a mixer (which is what other podcasters do). 

The Rode Podcaster is an Australian-made podcast mic. It has a headphone jack in the actual microphone, so you can hear yourself speak without the latency. But I am not sure whether this will allow me to hear the sound effects or music at the same time. The next problem is whether I can use two of these at once in different USB slots.

If I go to the mixer, then the Rode Procaster might be the go. I will need to take some advice but I suspect this will be the best setup for interviews.

Once I had the raw product, it took a little while to play around with it in Audacity. Listening to the completed product often is required - my first few attempts left wild gaps in the middle of nowhere and my intended puns with the sound effects were completely lost because my timing was all over the shop. It would seem that "time spent in [editing] is seldom wasted".

First, I had to find a way to create the RSS feed for my blog. I played around with Feedburner (I had used this years before). No problems, all set up. But no.

I went to setup on Stitcher, thinking I could add my RSS feed and off I would go. But you need to register as a partner. You can't use the same email address as the one you used to become a listener. So off I went back to my ISP's site to add a new email address. 

Second, I had to enter the RSS feed into the application for a station. This failed. So off I went to the W3C Feed Validator. Validation successful! But there was no podcast anywhere. I needed to have this uploaded somewhere first.

Lifewire had the solution. This made sense of some parts of Blogger I had never used before. The article covers everything you need. Except how to host your podcast to somewhere.

So off I go to Soundcloud. So much easier than Stitcher. Soundcloud allows you to set up with Creative Commons, and in Settings>Content I found the program's RSS feed. So back to W3C Feed Validator and bam! no problems, so over to Stitcher and bam! no problems. The Soundcloud info is brought into Stitcher, so if you don't like the profile picture or info in Stitcher, you have to change it in Soundcloud. 

And from there it was time to add the logo (with the appropriate permission!) and there it is. I have added the Soundcloud player to Blogger. It was pretty straight-forward once I solved the initial dramas.

But that is how it all panned out. Below is my first Stitcher podcast, and I hope very soon to have some interviews appearing on Stitcher and Soundcloud, and later iTunes. Hopefully this will be of some use to others.

Personal Gartner Hype Curve: 20 Years of Social Media

Le Flâneur Social Media Hype Curve, 1997-2017

I just realised I have been using social media for twenty years. The diagram above explains my love/hate relationship with social media. I left out MSN Messenger, but it wasn't memorable.

The Enervation of Innovation: or, You cannot order people to be innovative

The Enervation of Innovation. By Michael de Percy (years ago)

Innovation is something dear to my heart but during the TQM days of the 1990s, "innovative and imaginative" were words that regularly featured on my "buzzword bingo" card at meetings. It was back on the agenda again recently along with "agile".

The idea of floating countries, known as seasteading, appeared in an ABC News article back in March. It made me think of a cartoon I drew (rather poorly) after yet another game of buzzword bingo.

Seasteading and the idea of starting all over again suggests all sorts of possibilities. But it would probably take us back to the beginning. Amor fati I say.

To the tune of CCR's Lodi:

If I only had a dollar, for every innovation I bled some, 

Every time I've had to work, while buzzword generators went home,

Got all excited about something new, only to suffer the pain,

Oh Lord, my innovation's been thwarted again"...

Getting my podcast groove on...

"Saint-Germain-des-Prés - Paris" 2017, oil pastel on paper by Margarita Georgiadis

The picture above is a work by Margarita Georgiadis. It is in with the framer and will look like a million dollars when we get it back later in the year. When thinking of a picture for this podcast, I thought of all the linkages this photo provides.

The building pictured above also happens to appear in a Google images search results for "le flaneur". I don't look gift horses in the mouth anymore, I just go with the flow. Here is the same building in a painting by Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877 (see below).

Gustave Caillebotte. Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877. Public domain via Wikimedia.

In putting together these test podcasts, I am drawing on years of learning, hours of time in the chair in front of the screen, trial and error, heartache, disappointment. But was any of it wasted time? I don't think so.

Years ago I was using Facebook and wikis and blogs in my teaching - this was back in 2008. The something happened with an upgrade to the learning management system and I lost all interest in doing it again. 

But after a decent break and a revamp of my teaching philosophy and my research philosophy, and a little bit of work on being grateful for the opportunities I have had to learn, I can see a way to reconcile the competing demands of modern life with my ideas of the pastoral lifestyle that escaped even Virgil.

Enter the podcast. Doing a podcast by oneself is a lonely thing. I daresay it isn't very interesting for others either. But I need to work through the process. I am using a number of old faithful applications plus a few new ones. 

The biggest issue is the latency when I use the microphone. One must have headphones on, which means one then needs to monitor the microphone through the headphones. It is a catch-22 dilemma.

I have some interesting music which is licenced with Creative Commons. Some I found from the Free Music Archive. The track at the end of this podcast is Beaconsfield Villas Stomp by Doctor Turtle and is licenced CC BY-NC 4.0.

The sound effects are from AR Sound Effects on YouTube. The Terms and Conditions tell me I can use an MP3 converter so I used Youtube to MP3 Converter. it works really well and the sound effects are great.

In this podcast, I try to weave too many things together, as there wasn't much thought put into it. I was really just thinking out loud while getting a workable system happening. I have a while to go but it feels much smaller than the massive hulk that had me cringing at the thought of honour my own commitments to myself that I could easily have ignored because nobody else knew. But that is hardly the examined life.

The talk with John Laws happened before I was in the embargoed journalists' meeting with the then Communications Minister and now Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, and former Telstra legend Dr Ziggy Switkowski, for the launch of NBN Lite after the coalition's election victory. The Conversation asked me to go in and get a story out as soon as the embargo was lifted. Here is a link to that article.

I remember thinking that to be a real academic, one had to be on Tripel J's Hack. I got two guernseys on that show, but John Laws, even in retirement, really took the cake. To be talking to the man who I had listened to almost every day forty years previously was certainly a career highlight. I daresay this podcast may not be. it is heartfelt, but its main purpose is to be my audio lorem ipsum so I can get a decent podcast technique happening. But I do I hope you enjoy it.

Credits:

Sound effects: AR Sound Effects, YouTube. Royalty free, see Terms and Conditions.

Music: Beaconsfield Villas Stomp by Dr Turtle, CC BY-NC 4.0.

Instructions: Marziah Karch, Lifewire.

Art is Dead (again); or, The coward within Art is momentarily resurrected, then dies one of its ten thousand deaths...

Art is Dead. Long live Art!
Photo: Flickr/Peter Bihr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

I believe that my work must be guided by a philosophy, and not just any philosophy, but one that begins at my beginning and hopefully stands the test of time, or at least my time. This week I insisted with some colleagues that having a clear philosophy was important. Not everybody can see the importance. But when things go wrong, or we disagree about a particular direction, our arguments become philosophical.

I had decided that my task as a philosopher must be to compose a theory of representations, which would be a philosophy of what it is to be human (Arthur Danto).

Take Andy Warhol as an example. Art or not? Well. Arthur Danto played a big part in bringing out the philosophy of art.

Andy Warhol and art is dead? Again, it is the philosophy that makes art and thought and music live.

A bunch of brillo pads isn't art, but a painted wooden box made to look exactly the same is art. Why? Philosophy.

Watch Synecdoche, New York. Does it make sense now?

Technological Disruption: What role for government?

Photo by Paul Townsend (CC BY-ND 2.0)

I picked this draft post up from February this year and decided just to get it out there... My article in The Conversation was used in a Parliamentary Brief on the at the time of broadcasting legislation amendments in 2015-16. This topic is worth revisiting.



The demise of Presto has been attributed to too many service providers in Australia's small market. But competition in the Australian television industry has been absent for too long and it is the normal functioning of competition in the market.

While some suggest that free trade is not living up to its expectations, Australians should not be too eager to criticise local attempts to offer alternatives to Netflix. The origins of broadcasting in Australia were plagued by government attempts to avoid competition, and much like the taxi industry, consumer prices for pay-TV services such as Foxtel were a function of the regulatory environment.

In his book The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer, Paul Barry tells the story of Steve Cosser's attempt to deliver pay-TV services using microwave, known as Multichannel Multipoint Distribution Systems (MMDS) in Australia. Why things should be any different today one might wonder.

Developing My Research Philosophy Part 4: Le Flâneur Politique

Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project

I believe that philosophy is the proper starting place for any human endeavour. While I was on long service leave, I was trying to formulate my research philosophy, and trying to work out how I could "fit in" in an increasingly bureaucratic world. After reading Ryan Holiday and Steven Pressfield, I found Stoic philosophy helpful: we can rationally decide what is and what is not within our control. Once this is done, even in relation to my research, then the rest falls into place.

Walter Benjamin's work The Arcades Project interests me from a number of angles. I devoured The Flâneur "Convolute M." (1999, pp. 416-455). Later, "Le Flâneur" surfaced while I was reading the Paris Review, and the idea of the nineteenth-century Parisian flâneur struck me as a model for my research philosophy. I want to be able to study politics and policy without being an essential part of the machine, but I still have to play the game. Enter:

The figure of the flâneur—the stroller, the passionate wanderer emblematic of nineteenth-century French literary culture—has always been essentially timeless; he removes himself from the world while he stands astride its heart. When Walter Benjamin brought Baudelaire’s conception of the flâneur into the academy, he marked the idea as an essential part of our ideas of modernism and urbanism. For Benjamin, in his critical examinations of Baudelaire’s work, the flâneur heralded an incisive analysis of modernity, perhaps because of his connotations: “[the flâneur] was a figure of the modern artist-poet, a figure keenly aware of the bustle of modern life, an amateur detective and investigator of the city, but also a sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism,” as a 2004 article in the American Historical Review put it. Since Benjamin, the academic establishment has used the flâneur as a vehicle for the examination of the conditions of modernity—urban life, alienation, class tensions, and the like. 

The direction my philosophy took was exciting. I had found a unifying principle for all the things I enjoy: art, music, philosophy, history, reading, architecture, theatre, and so on. Benjamin understood a similar approach: The 'variegated traces of daily life of "the collective"... was to be the object of study, and with methods - above all, in their dependence on chance - to the nineteenth century collector of antiquities and curiosities, or indeed the methods of the nineteenth-century ragpicker, than to those of the modern historian' (p. ix). 

As an historical institutionalist, the "historical rummaging" (see Skocpol, T. (1995). ‘Why I Am an Historical Institutionalist’, Polity, 28(1): 103-106) is part of the satisfaction, especially when one finds the historical gem.

The approach, when combined with Stoicism, has allowed me to overcome the constant dissatisfaction that surrounded me before moving to Gunning: cheap architecture,  people glued to their phones, academics telling me they didn't have time to read books, me pretending to know something when I had never read the work from cover to cover.

General George S. Patton believed in reincarnation and claimed to have been in combat many times throughout history. I often think of him as someone born in the wrong era. But I never quite thought that for my own dissatisfaction with this era.

I suppose the idea of le flâneur politique gives me a steampunk approach to academe and the political - I get to enjoy the best of both worlds. And that, I think, completes my four-part contemplation of my research philosophy and six months of thinking about it.

Related posts:

• My thoughts on the co-evolution of my research and my blogging.
• Developing my research philosophy, Part 1.
• Developing my research philosophy, Part 2.
• Developing my research philosophy, Part 3.

Le Flâneur
Paul Gavarni [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons