Monkeys like peanuts

Posted on by

Full disclosure throws up some very interesting comparisons.

For example we know that in Australia the prime minister is awarded an annual salary of $507,338

Not a bad earn. There will be allowances and the like and not too many groceries to buy thanks to endless corporate dinners and executive lunches. Certainly beats the socks off the salary of the average Australian that is $72,800 currently the 5th highest in the world.

Immediate reaction #1 — You have to be kidding, that’s far too much to pay a politician

 

Now we take a gander at the salaries of company CEOs. This is possible thanks to the requirement of boards to state executive remuneration in the company annual report. And there are websites that collate these numbers into accessible lists.

Turns out that the average [as in mean] salary of a top 50 business CEOs is $7,485,000 per annum. Just 15 times more than the PM.

In 2014 the pauper on the CEOs list, languishing down in 300th place on the earnings ladder, made $869,000

Immediate reaction #2 — You have to be kidding, that’s far too much to pay anyone

 

In what universe are the top ranking CEOs making decisions an order of magnitude more important that those of the prime minister. He was elected to look after our interests?

Turns out if you add up the salaries of PM and his cabinet ministers it comes to roughly $8.7 million — 13 CEOs earned more than this on their own.

It doesn’t make any sense. But if you, reluctantly I hope, accept that this is the world we live in where an individual is considered important enough to earn seven figures to run a company, then you get…

Immediate reaction #3 — You have to be kidding, pay peanuts get monkeys

 

Accumulated knowledge

Posted on by

damselflyIf you wanted to read all that humanity knows about damselflies it would take you a while.

A Google scholar search on ‘biology of damselflies’ provides a list of nearly 9,000 research papers and this is just the start. Not every paper will have biology in the title, so search ‘damselflies’ and we are up to 13,000. Dig a bit more and there are over 68,000 publications containing information on damselflies and their charming cousins the dragonflies.

Suppose you really like these flying denizens of forest glades and decide to become an expert in their biology. By allocating 10 minutes to each publication — time to scan the abstract, a graphic or two and the key points of the discussion — then you would be at it for over 11,000 hours.

Make than 6 years of full-time work with no holidays.

In the good old days of the gentleman naturalist you might actually have taken on this herculean task. Your passion for damselflies would make the work a pleasure and independent wealth afforded you all the time in the world.

There was no need to produce anything from your all those hours in a wing chair by the fire. A mind brim full of detail on mating rituals, prey selection and peptide inhibitors was enough. That you could bore the pants off your dinner guests was simply a bonus.

Not so today.

Anyone afforded the luxury of 72 months with the accumulated human knowledge of damselflies would need a product at the end — a research thesis at least. And that thesis would only pass muster if it added to the already huge body of knowledge.

Your studies could not be completed in front of the fire surrounded by a library of leather bound books with the whiff of coal smoke across your nostrils. No sir.

After just a small amount of reading you would be donning a white coat and spending the rest of time in the laboratory dissecting the tiny abdomens of Diphlebia nymphoides, a pretty blue species native to eastern Australia. How else would you discover the true variability in digestive efficiency?

Only if you were really lucky would you have first donned hiking boots and trekked to the streams and creeks with a butterfly net to catch a few specimens for your analysis.

Even when the body of knowledge is vast our job is to add to it. Human endeavour is all about adding to the pile. We are addicted to making things bigger and better.

And boy is this mountain of human knowledge growing. The 869 papers on damselflies published in 2014 is double the number published in the entire decade of the 1970s.

Clearly damselflies are not central to any of the many economic or social challenges of our times. At best research might provide some details on how to avoid their extinction. So why do it beyond bald curiosity passed down the generations?

The reason for the burgeoning knowledge is simple. There are many more people than there used to be.

More people means there is more education, more universities with science faculties, and more students in attendance. The law of large numbers does the rest. Even the most esoteric topics will have more people interested in them than in the past.

So the body of knowledge grows, even for damselflies.

Pause for a moment to consider what this process of knowledge creation means. It is nearly impossible for any one person to have read everything we know about damselflies. Even if they were given a decade in the drawing room they might not get to all of it.

We have a searchable repository of the knowledge in the cloud that makes it easy to find specific facts. This is fine if you are already an expert and know what you are looking for.

But most people simply wouldn’t look. And if nobody spends any time in the winged armchair only the cloud will have the accumulated knowledge.

Et tu Brute

Posted on by

Caesar‘You, too, Brutus’, said Caesar forlorn with sadness and perhaps a hint of incredulity across his brow at the moment of his agonised death. At least that is what Shakespeare decided were the last words of the most famous victim of murder for political gain.

I have just watched all three episodes of The Killing Season on iView — all 234 minutes in one sitting. It was an excellent piece of historical journalism by the ABCs Sara Ferguson that through interviews with key players lays bare the extraordinary events in Australian Federal politics from 2007 to 2012. There were four prime ministers, two elections and an open disregard for the best interests of the country. Easily the modern equivalent of murder for political gain.

Specifically it’s how a political party can trash itself from within. More worryingly it shows a triumph of ego over integrity that destroyed the public’s faith in political process.

Watch it. Pay special attention to body language and facial expressions. Some feelings are hard to hide even for the professional spin artists.

But this post is not about that sorry saga at all. It is about an opinion piece by Eleanor Gordon-Smith, a writer and radio producer who teaches philosophy and ethics at the University of Sydney.

Gordon-Smith claims that the violent words ‘assassin’, ‘midnight door knock’, ‘execution’ and the like have no place in rational journalism. Nice try but a hollow attempt to dilute the message.

I am sorry. No one can airbrush this blemish. The Australian Labour Party destroyed its integrity and that of the political process in not one, but two ‘coup de grace’. Luckily no daggers were required to achieve the ends — a leader replaced by another that the people did not vote for — but the result was the same.

That labour supporters resort to such pathetic excuses is actually more worrying still. It suggests that despite being shown the truth they still fail to accept that their internal systems were flawed. Systems so dysfunctional that individuals without a mandate and not much more than inflated egos could bring down prime ministers. The labour party should say sorry to us for such irresponsible behaviour.

Instead of clutching at a semantic straw they should fess up, preferably with a resounding commitment not to do it again. And, should the party govern again, it will promise to put the best interest of the country before any petty internal squabbling.

While all this was going on the political right weighed in with dirty politics of their own. They trash talked and played every card they had, including aligning with the kinds of extreme views that they now claim to despise. They too came out of this period smelling bad — like opportunists without a moral compass.

Caesar did not expect that his friend Brutus would desert him, but he did.

In modern times the political dagger is no less lethal because it destroys far more than political careers. It bleeds away our faith in democracy.

What I learned lately about… courage

Posted on by

 

stormy seaCourage is priceless

First of all I am not talking about the winning of a Victoria Cross. For me that is bravery, you either have that or not as it emerges unbidden in extremes. Nobody really knows if they are brave until they face a clear danger head on.

Courage is subtler.

We need it every day, sometimes only in small amounts as it fuels the success and enjoyment of our days. Courage is what gets us out of bed and allows us to engage with the world and each other. It lets us believe in good and cope with bad.

Without it we would all be lost.

Move to the next car if you want to have chat

Posted on by

train-carriageAh yes, the quiet carriage.

Sydney has banished raucous commuting. On suburban trains half the carriages are designated quiet. Mobile phones must go to silent, chitchat is prohibited and music cannot leak from ear buds.

Woe betides anyone who flouts these rules.

Whisper above the ambient ‘clickety-clack’ and a death stare will burn the back of your head. Carry on talking and there will be an indignant tap on the shoulder from an angry passenger about to shower vitriol on your flouting of the rules.

Not far under the surface of everyone is an authoritarian. Barely hidden is an alter ego itching to call chancers to task — to meet out justice onto anyone who fails to conform. The gusto with which this persona breaks out will scare more than the horses.

Harmless looking women of a certain age explode at a blip above a murmur. Anyone daring to select Powderfinger on their Bose’s have no idea of the terror that awaits them in the quiet carriage.

Stares and shoulder taps are just the beginning.

In a few bars they are hounded into submission. It is a wonder to behold.

Shame nobody called to task the hefty dude who fell asleep on the 06:44 to central.

His snoring had no place on the quiet carriage.

What I learned lately about… cooking

Posted on by

pavlovaAnybody could cook but not many can.

The other day I threw together a green vegetable curry and it tasted pretty good. I winged it from what was left in the fridge, a can of coconut milk and the dregs from a jar of curry paste. It helped that we had a lime, some cane sugar cubes, long green chilli and plenty of fresh coriander.

Also this week I diligently followed a recipe for lemon rice that went beautifully with some left over chicken that the real cook in the house made the day before.

And now I think I know who can cook.

It is anyone with their mind in and on the food.

Ingenuity rules

Posted on by

Hardwood timber, ManokwariAre you ever amazed at human ingenuity? I have been staggered by it lately.

Thanks to my time of life, or some internal dormant desire, I have been spending far too much time watching Youtube videos. Given the endless topics that people are prepared to make videos about you could spend many a lifetime on this medium watching Russians do crazy things, animals being cute and a two year old dropping the f-bomb in the ice bucket challenge.

There are also a multitude of channels by random dudes [and the occasional chick] displaying the intricacies of dovetail joints, router tables and fast drying shellac.

Yes, it’s time to build your own wood shop. A place where a middle-aged man can retire to make things that nobody wants and often look crap but satisfies a curious urge to create.

Thanks to the interweb you don’t have to buy magazines or books to figure out how to cut a cove with a table saw. You can watch Matthias Wendel do it. He’ll even figure out and show you what you have to do to the saw blade to make the cut cleaner.

Even though the hours of instructional videos just the prelude to making a bedside table — as with most things action can be avoided if you see there is someone else already doing it — the instruction is not what has captivated me. It’s the problem solving skills.

Anyone who has worked at all with wood, or house renovations for that matter, knows there is a wrong way to do something and several right ways. It is possible to cut a board straight with a table saw, a circular saw, a compound mitre saw or any number of hand saws. Each will do the job given a level of skill.

These woodworking gurus are all about finding the next best way. They revel in the problem solving and in the engineering that takes. Why cut a tenon with a saw when you can do it with a panto-router, or much better, a home made panto-router?

So this is what they do. They find new ways of doing things.

They even admit when the new way has flaws and then post another video showing how they fixed them. It is actually refreshing and uplifting to watch.

It also explains how we came to be so successful a species. We really know how to fix things. In fact we can find 10 different fixes for any given challenge even of there is already one that works perfectly well.

We really did take tool use to the next level. It truly is amazing what you can do with a router.

Recognising what we know

Posted on by

There is a very funny scene in an episode of the Big Bang Theory where Penny asks Sheldon and Leonard trivia questions about famous American rock bands. Needless to say they are clueless. Not even Sheldon’s eidetic memory could rescue him. Penny’s infamous smirk was never funnier.

So now, do you know what this is?

equation

Don’t worry. A thousand people chosen at random from the population probably wouldn’t know either.

Most folk would be able to tell you that it was ‘some science shit’ and a few of them might know it was an equation for something.

Just one or two would recognise the mathematical notation for the third law of thermodynamics that states all processes cease as temperature approaches absolute zero.

But if more than two out of 1,000 people knew this you would suspect that the sampling was far from random. Perhaps it took place in the coffee break of a theoretical physics congress attended by Dr Coopers.

Now, of course, if you did sample 1,000 delegates from said congress, not all of them would recognise the equation. But I digress from my main point, which is this…

Each of us can only know a tiny fraction of what is known.

Even the eidetic can only remember what they have seen or heard. And for those of us who forget all the time, then our fraction can be small indeed.

The curious thing is that rather than get to know a little about a lot, people specialise. Either by choice or just as a default from our experiences we focus. After a while we all know quite a lot about something.

There are people who know more than seems possible about the cutting tolerances of a lathe or the rules that govern a financial balance sheet. There will be someone who can recite by heart the poems of Keats and someone else who can quote the test batting averages of all players in the current Indian cricket squad and then proceed to tell you why many of them should never have been selected.

This accumulation of specific knowledge is very useful. It gives us great depth in technical and practical matters. How else would an accounting firm provide services or repairs be made to a faulty MRI scanner? Not to mention brewing a decent coffee.

We need people who know the details.

What has struck me of late is just how specialised we have become and how little this means we know when presented with material outside our expertise. Just like Sheldon and Leonard, we are easily at a loss.

And yet we also take for grated what we know.

Because I have been in the guts of ecological science in research, teaching and my consulting practice for far too long, I take scientific knowledge for granted. For example, I can easily see the link between grazing management and soil carbon — graze too hard and soil carbon declines — and the net environmental benefits of changes to grazing practices that stop or even reverse that soil carbon decline.

What I can’t do is assume that a specialist in financial assurance will see or believe that such a link exists. She needs evidence. And as the language and logic flow falls outside her expertise she will need some persuading.

This is usually not a problem because ecology and accounting speak happening in the same room is about as rare as a female financial specialist. Except that they are about to collide.

The next decades will require that food production doubles or a lot of people will go hungry. Hungry people are not easily or righty ignored and the only way to feed them will be to invest in more efficient food production, distribution and storage systems.

It will be a time for specialisms to be recognised and respected. Times approach when the lion will lie down with the lamb… and come to some agreement.

This will only happen if expertise and depth of knowledge is respected. If we have to spend all the time convincing each other we actually know stuff then the solution will slip away.

So be grateful that someone among the 1,000 knows the formula for the third law of thermodynamics and don’t dismiss her for being odd.

It will be smarter to listen to she has to say.

Your last 100 days

Posted on by

masterpiece-detailThe end of your world is nigh.

You are told by God, a noted and reliable source, that in 100 days it all ends for you. Your mortal coil will burn out. You become the rarest of individuals who knows exactly when it will all be over.

What would you do with 100 days if they were all you had left?

Perhaps sell the house and tick off as many bucket list items as you can in the time, spiced up with liberal quantities of gay abandon.

You might reconnect with family and friends splurging out on dinner parties twice a week being sure to get the caterers in.

The grudges and prejudices that have dogged you for decades might be melted away as you spend your last 100 days on a mountaintop sweeping up leaves.

You might choose to ignore God’s 100-day deadline claiming a ruse and believe that you actually had a lot more time.

Clearly there will be as many ways to fill the last 100 days as there are people to fill them.

The most common theme among the disparate choices will be to do more or less the same as you always do. You will text, tweet, post and play Candy Crush. You will watch hours of crime dramas and cooking shows on TV. You will complain and argue, laugh and sing. Because these are the things that you do now when you have an unknown amount of time left. They are warm and familiar things that we all choose to do everyday.

And the thing is that you choose to do them. On the train to work, in the evening after dinner, at the weekends, in the 72 hours of the week you are not sleeping or working.

Yes, you choose to do them.

Think about it.

Riddle me this

Posted on by

office-blockThe CEO of Widgets-R-Us is a progressive kind of fellow. No matter that his after work cross-dressing has become an obsession.

In the daytime he thinks hard about the business of selling widgets and is always looking for ways to make improvements. One day as he sipped orange juice in the front of a morning flight to the capital, an article in a magazine caught his eye. It was on the merits of unexpected pay rises and he read it twice.

Fortified by the prospect of a motivated workforce the CEO called his chairman before the seat belt sign was off and easily persuaded him of the merits of pay rises all around. A few weeks later he proudly announced a board sanctioned raise of 5% for everyone in the company.

Not only that but if the company performance improved more pay rises were to come. He proudly told the now eager employees that this made him feel humble to be able to help everyone out.

Sure enough widgets cascaded off the production lines and on to consumers with unprecedented efficiency. The company became hugely successful kicked along by a newly efficient and pay rise motivated workforce.

In the blink of a corporate eye the base pay of everyone in the company had doubled and the CEO smiled all the way to his favourite car dealer.

And the riddle is?