A few snippets

I missed the earlier reports on the Marieke Hardy case.

Apparently Ms Hardy last month apologised and agreed to pay a reported $13,000 to online music critic Joshua Meggitt for attacking him online, wrongly believing he was responsible for writing a slanderous blog. Now it appears that action has begun against the ABC's online and TV segment The Drum for allegedly repeating the defamation of Mr Meggitt.

Just another reminder on the need to exercise a degree of care in our public writing. With the New England blog having just passed 70,000 visits, this one coming up on 140,000 visits, it's a bit difficult to hide!

Jim Russell's Burgh Diaspora had an interesting short post Mating With Migrants on language shifts in the United States. I quote:

"The typical pattern for any language change is always the young women," says Lars Hinrichs, assistant professor of English language and linguistics at UT and director of the Texas English Project. "If you pronounce things the new way, you have power — you're hotter. The more popular girls lead the way." ...

Mmm!

In a short post in the New York Times, Paul Krugman compares recent GDP changes in some European countries with the great depression. This is the graph for the UK.

A bit depressing, actually!

My 18 January Armidale Express column, Belshaw's World - problems with colours, attracted some interest. It dealt with colours and personality.

Writing that column took my thoughts in two different directions, one personal, the other professional. At personal level I wondered about the possible roles of personal managers. At professional level, about the way that organisations end up recruiting similar personality types. Maybe more later.

The Stubborn Mule has continued his data scraping and statistical analysis, this time looking at the Triple J Top 100. I quote:  

For those outside Australia, the Hottest 100 is a chart of the most popular songs of the previous year, as voted by the listeners of the radio station Triple J. The tradition began in 1991, but initially people voted for their favourite song of all time. From 1993 onwards, the poll took its current form* and was restricted to tracks released in the year in question.

Since the Hottest 100 Wikipedia pages include country of origin**, I thought I would see whether there is any pattern in whose music Australians like best. Since it is Australia Day, it is only appropriate that we are partial to Australian artists and they typically make up close to half of the 100 entries. Interestingly, in the early 90s, Australian artists did not do so well. The United Kingdom has put in a good showing over the last two years, pulling ahead of the United States. Beyond the big three, Australia, UK and US, the pickings get slim very quickly.

I was actually a bit surprised at the popularity of Australian tracks since there is a common perception about the swamping effects of overseas especially US popular music. To read further, the first post is Hottest 100 for 2011, the second More on the Hottest 100.

In comments on Australia Day, columns and externalities, Winton Bates and I talked about the market for CEOs. I said that I would follow up with a post. I will try to do so tomorrow.

Well, it's 6am and the world is stirring. I need to turn to other things.