Where to now?
Displaying 11 - 19 of 19 articles
Another day, another paradox in Australian parliament. Yesterday, the greenest party in the federal parliament (ie the Greens) voted down a bill to increase the tax on petrol. Why? Because the money it…
Let’s face it, for an academic it had been a long time since there was too much to get passionate about in Federal politics. The latter Howard years were more of the same and the joy of the Rudd “education…
Today I awoke to the news that Germany has announced its intention to withdraw from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project. The SKA is an ambitious project that plans to build a radio telescope with…
I love the free market. It means my morning cup of coffee costs roughly the same at almost all the coffee shops near campus. The free market is however ruthlessly efficient, even if it is largely responsible…
Our treasurer Joe Hockey is looking to cut the budget and where possible create a user-pays approach to spending. Universities and their graduates are an obvious target. In Australia we have the quite…
The Australian Attorney General, Senator George Brandis, is no stranger to controversy. His statement in parliament that “people do have a right to be bigots” rapidly gained him notoriety, and it isn’t…
As an astrophysicist I fly a lot. Mainly to telescopes, conferences and workshops. And while I’ve learnt that life is not transformed into one of unparallelled joy by becoming a Gold frequent flyer, it…
In our naive youth, we imagine scientific careers that are exceedingly pure. In them, all that matters is the quality of our ideas, evidence and insight, written up in concise documents and published in…
Malala Yousafzai, the 15-year-old Pakistani education activist ruthlessly shot by the Taliban last month for the “crime” of promoting education for girls, has become an inspiring symbol of courage against…