James5

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Last semester I once again was extremely grateful for having Devonthink to help me out with a research paper.

For those that don’t know Devonthink is a personal database you keep on your Mac. You throw your pdfs, documents, links, e-mails into it and leverage it’s powerful AI and search technologies to help with research and writing. It looks a bit clunky, and kills my Powerbook’s CPU, but is an invaluable program if you do any amount of research.

I had a public policy research paper that required me to investigate the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement, and determine whether policy networks were at work in relation to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (they were but weakly).

There was a Senate Select Committee and Joint Standing Committee report on the FTA, the submissions of which would have been an absolute gold mine for researching the positions of various players and their connections. The problem? There were over 700 separate submissions, some of which were just scans of letters.

Thankfully, I had Devonthink to help me out.

First, Devonthink allows you to take a URL and it will automatically find and download all the links on that page.

So I fed it the Committee site that had links to all the submissions. Devonthink then went to work downloading over 700 pdfs for me.

Second, Devonthink Pro Office has built in OCR software, so despite the best efforts of Parliament to make their documents unsearchable, after running the OCR I had a massive searchable database of submissions.

Third, I used Devonthink’s search function to limit my enquiry to only those submissions that mention the PBS. This cut back the number of pdfs to only around 200 - down from 700! Quite a time saver.

Finally, I also used the search function to see if any of the players were mentioning each other in their submissions. Allowing me to establish if there were any links between the different groups.

All of this cut down on the amount of time I had to waste trawling through submissions manually, giving me more time to actually think about and write the paper. I ended up getting a good mark thanks to being able to quickly find all the relevant documents and linkages between them.

Now if only I could figure out a good referencing program (that actually saved time not made more work!) my student life would be made a easier.

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So Australian musicians are crying poor. The Veronicas, Grinspoon and Powderfinger want us to believe they are living the hard life due to music piracy. While I’m in no way endorsing wholesale piracy this has got to be the worst idea ever. No-one is going to believe, even when it’s true, that these guys are having a hard time.

Quote from article:

“Her twin sister, Jessica [from the Veronicas], says being a musician is a “100 per cent 24/7 full-time job” and while there are lots of parties, most of the time spent at them is consumed by media interviews.

I’m sorry, but if the worst situation she can come up with is that “most of the time is consumed by interviews” then I doubt people are going to stop pirating their music. Yes there are lots of poor musicians out there who need people to buy their music to survive, but (a) the Veronicas certainly aren’t one of them and (b) I seriously doubt whether the pirating demographic is the demographic who like those indy bands who need support.

The internet is a godsend for small acts with no exposure. They can literally build their fanbase themselves with minimal need for the big ARIA companies. They can develop true relationships with their fans that’ll mean the fans won’t want to rip them off and will want to pay for their music.

Unfortunately, that’s not how the big companies see it.

Figures released by the Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) show that physical CD sales dropped 12 per cent last year to $420 million. Legal music downloads were up 43 per cent to $40 million, but the strong growth has not been enough to make up for the rapidly declining CD sales.

Until iTunes came along it was incredibly hard to get online access to music that you could easily listen to on all your devices - it was easier to just pirate it. CD sales are dropping because people no longer want to buy filler, pay for shipping and can’t be bothered going to the stores when it’s all online.

I’m not worried about the death of the Australian music industry. Even if ARIA refuses to adapt and dies out, I’m 100% sure that musicians will keep making music. Online, on the streets, in pubs, or on stage - music will happen. This militant approach to consumers is a ridiculous segue in the emergence of the music industry 2.0.

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I recently had a look at the Senate Committee Report on the National Market Driven Energy Efficiency Target Bill 2007 - a private members bill introduced by the Democrats.

It provides some interesting reading, summarising a variety of submissions on the topic of a “national energy efficiency trading system”. In a nutshell, the Bill would require electricity companies would be required to buy a certain number of energy efficiency certificates (EEC). EECs are created by energy efficiency increasing measures. So for example, if the minimum energy standard for fridges is 3.5 stars but a manufacturer sells one that is rated at 5 stars EECs are created and given to the manufacturer who can then sell it on to the electricity company. The idea is that this acts as an incentive for people to make/buy efficient products or to build efficient buildings and thus reduce their environmental impact.

It’s an interesting idea, which basically boils down to paying people to help themselves - or in this instance making power companies pay people to help themselves. But I’m not entirely convinced (the Committee recommended against passing the bill).

First, it’s not clear that an efficiency trading scheme is really required to spur these efficiency savings. As the Committee found, increasing the price of carbon emissions alone is likely spur people on to increase their energy efficiency. Why do we need an added layer of bureaucracy to achieve the same goal? And there’s a whole raft of problems in designed in the system properly, setting standards, monitoring etc, which is just asking for trouble.

Second, the problem with a baseline-and-credit scheme such as this efficiency trading one is that it is a lot less reliable in terms of figuring out how much this is really helping the environment. Buying a TV that uses less electricity is now guarantee that you will actually use less electricity - you may just run the TV for longer. Or you may just buy two TV’s.

Mr Matt Brazier drew the committee’s attention to the role of affluence and population growth as drivers of consumption growth and he believes that currently these drivers are open-ended and exponential whereas the opportunities for energy efficiency are limited. He pointed out that improving efficiencies will make a permanent difference if demand growth is zero:

So long as basic demand continues to grow, efforts aimed at addressing environmental issues through efficiency improvements are like feeding a crocodile lean meat in the hope that it won’t grow bigger.

Even though the national scheme is on hold for a while, that’s not to say Australia won’t have a few state schemes in operation, for example, the New South Wales scheme. And these “White Tag” trading schemes are slowly being initiated overseas too. It will be interesting to see what part they play in fighting climate change.

I recognise that reducing our emissions will require a combination of interesting, unique and sometimes out there techniques. And people a lot smarter than me think efficiency trading is a pretty good idea, so I’m not entirely opposed to the idea, but wonder if there aren’t better ways to encourage energy efficiency?

See also Negawatts.

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The two videos below are quite excellent in their execution.

For some reason it reminds me of that excellent movie, Children of Men - something about the world falling apart. It’s also interesting how awkward it feels just watching the presenters not saying anything for 2 minutes - tells me something about my social mores.

If you’re wondering how they did it…They split the screen into two and stitched together all the instances each presenter wasn’t talking. It’s more obvious in the second clip. Very clever.

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It’s that time of semester again, essays due, exams coming. Here’s a quick hint to make your research a smidgen easier (if you’re at the University of Melbourne that is).

While we all love SuperSearch and being able to search all the big databases at once, store our finds for later use, etc. Sometimes it is just a bit easier to use Google Scholar to get those hard to find sources and keep all your research sorted.

The hard part is clicking through the Google Scholar search results and needing a subscription to view the articles. Of course we have a subscription through UniMelb, but Google Scholar doesn’t know that. The good news is that the uni uses EzProxy which means it’s actually pretty easy to construct URLs to link you into the subscription services.

You just add http://ezproxy.lib.unimelb.edu.au/login?url= to the start of the URL you get from Google Scholar and if the uni has a subscription to the Journal/Database you can login and connect to the source.

To make things easier, I made a ‘bookmarklet’ that you can add to your bookmark toolbar in your browser. You just click it and it automatically adds the URL to the start of the page you are on. To use it just drag the link below to your toolbar, or add it to your bookmarks, then just click it when you need it.

I probably haven’t explained this very well, so if you need more info ask in the comments.

Popularity: 24% [?]