Established in 1949, UNSW Sydney is one of Australia’s leading research and teaching universities, renowned for the quality of its graduates and its commitment to academic excellence, innovation and social impact.
Something remarkable has happened: 1000 economists have agreed with each other. In Washington, civil society groups will present a letter signed by 1000 economists from 50 countries to the annual G20 finance…
We are living in extraordinary times. People are using social media to campaign for freedom from their governments, but their ideas are built on a much more powerful medium: literature. Protests have swept…
Innovation is not a topic that attracts much serious political debate in Australia. It improves living standards and the economy, but we’re missing out because of the government’s short-sighted approach…
Australians expect paper-based elections to provide privacy, integrity and transparency. Why should we abandon these principles just because the election uses a magical device called a computer? The iVote…
On March 20, the day after NATO and US air and naval forces began the implementation of a no-fly zone over Libya authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1973, Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the…
In 1973, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) first aired The Six Million Dollar Man, a made-for-television movie in which Steve Austin, an astronaut test-piloting a prototype aeroplane, experienced…
Objective analysis of good microdata on students can yield results that are highly relevant to educational policy. This should come as no surprise, since it is the case in most other disciplines. To learn…
In the late 1980s, when I was a young whipper-snapper just starting out as an astronomer, it was quite obvious some fields had an incredibly high profile and others were outré. The sexy ideas at the time…
In the wake of the Queensland floods, the Christchurch earthquake, and the Japanese earthquake/tsunami/nuclear crisis, people are asking for advice about how we should manage the effects of disaster on…
One consequence of the global rise of GPS (Global Positioning System), and its inherent ability to track and record information, is that people feel their privacy is cramped, their movements recorded…
There are few issues as divisive in eastern Australia as duck hunting. And 2011 has been one of the most vitriolic seasons yet. The season opened in Victoria with news that a protester had been shot in…
Most of us don’t really understand climate change, and for some of us that means we can’t accept it. Sure, the evidence is compelling, but sadly humans aren’t always interested in evidence when it comes…
As six weeks’ rain gets dumped on Sydney in a single day and Queensland cleans up after shocking floods, it’s not surprising people ask if global warming is to blame for our weather woes. But following…
In recent years productivity growth in Australia has been in alarming decline. A series of government reports have identified some of the causes: infrastructure and skills inadequacies, bottlenecks and…
It is inevitable that we will one day venture into space beyond the moon not just with robots but in person. Exploration is part of the human psyche: we are risk-takers with an insatiable curiosity. No…
What lessons can we learn from the March 11 Japan earthquake and tsunami? Well, hindsight is a wonderful thing. We can, of course, question the wisdom of placing nuclear power plants in coastal locations…
Many of the nation’s most pressing problems cannot be met by any one government acting alone. Reforms to health, the environment, education, Indigenous disadvantage, taxation, business regulation and water…
With the state election in NSW approaching, and the predicted demise of the reign of Labor, there is no more perfect an opportunity to reflect on the way in which law and order issues have come to characterise…