Wednesday snippets

Here in Australia, the question of who did what and when in the period leading up to the overthrow of Kevin Rudd has been rattling the dovecotes. For those interested, you can get a feel here, here and here.

I have commented on the latest controversy nor on the continued speculation about Ms Gillard's future as PM for I really have little useful to say beyond the things that I have already said.

Over on World War II Day-By-Day, the daily reports have been tracking the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. British forces finally surrendered on 15 February 1942. This military disaster has acquired almost mythic status in Australia. Lindsay Murdoch's The day the empire died in shame will give you a feel.

Each participant including each member of Commonwealth and Empire has a different perspective on events. We tend to forget that.

Now turning to a totally different topic, the Australian free on-line newspaper, the Global Mail, appears to be gathering strength. Have a browse. I think that it's pretty good.

For those who like their history, I found Mike Dash's post Nice Things to Say About Attila the Hun quite fascinating.

Have you ever heard of ultimate frisbee? I had not  until Monday when I found that a girl at work played it This YouTube clip will give you a feel.

You will gather that I don't really feel like being too serious tonight, so I will finish here! 

Aymever Days 2 - getting started

Continuing the story from Aymever Days 1 - genesis, Denise came up to Armidale first, while I sorted out a few things in Canberra.

Based on my policy experience, I had a pretty clear idea what I wanted to achieve.

One of my complaints in Canberra lay in the impact of fragmentation, what we would now call siloing. There were two common approaches then adopted.

The first focused on small individual sectors, so that we had things with names like the room air conditioner industry. It was quite impossible to have sensible policies at this level of disaggregation because  there were so few real policy instruments available.

The second approach was the deal with big lumps such as manufacturing as a whole. I found this approach inadequate for two reasons.

The first lay in the variety across such a huge slab. Policy always has differential on-ground effects because people and firms respond to Government actions depending on their circumstances. The greater the variety in circumstance, the greater the divergence in actual outcomes. If you base policy on averages without taking variety into account, you will always get perverse results. 

The second reason was convergence. The old models then (and now) deeply entrenched in thinking go back to the industrial revolution and a now ancient industrial past. We have primary, secondary and tertiary. We have people who make or grow things, those who provide services to them.

Dealing with the electronics, aerospace and information industries, it was already clear that  convergence meant that the old models and the policies and statistical constructs based on those models were becoming increasingly irrelevant. A new approach was required that would allow for better integration.

The following diagram taken from the Aymever brochure shows our industry structure model. Further comments follow the diagram.

If you look at the diagram, you can see how we tried to integrate sectors around common relationships. Remember, the brochure was published around August 1989 and incorporated earlier thinking. If you look at the block containing broadcasting and television, you can see how we are already integrating that sector with information and communications services.

We began operating out of the family home at 202 Marsh Street, using one bedroom, the study and front verandah as space.

That immediate period is wrapped in nostalgia in my mind. I remember taking Denise to the hospital to have Helen and then coming back when it was clear that the birth would be delayed. I had a sleep in our bedroom just off the study while our people worked away.

Soon after Helen's birth, Denise and I went out to dinner. Coming back, the fax was spitting out pages. We were working on a large space bid in conjunction with a UK firm and had sent them material during the day. Now the responses were coming back. There was something wonderfully exciting about this, and I settled down to do a quick response.

It's one thing to have an industry model in mind, but how do you make money out of it?

The next graphic shows our services diagram.

We centred our services around the sector as defined with a sufficiently wide range of services to give us a chance of commercial viability. I believed in research and depth of knowledge, so we needed a basic research function. If we were to have that, then we might be able to sell research and contract information services. Information services as such were just coming into vogue. Later, we would add training services.

In growing a new business like this, you have to define who to recruit. I chose a mixed model.

Because there were few people in Australia with the generic skills we needed, we would recruit core staff young and train them up. We would then combine them with experienced associates who had the very specific skill sets we needed to complete particular tasks. 

We started with part time research and industry analysts, with the initial training sessions around the dining room table. Because we were industry specialists, the initial training focused on the electronics, aerospace and information industries. I then added product knowledge. All training had to be done from scratch.

Every staff member whether administrative of professional had to have a core knowledge. This included a detailed understanding of the workings of government.

I remember talking to Kathy Hall's dad at her wedding.

The wedding stands out in my mind not just because it was Kathy's wedding, but because of the links with then young Helen. To let Denise sleep, baby Helen and I used to watch Rage together. By the time of Kathy's wedding, I knew every one of the current songs. Most were played at the wedding!

At the wedding, Kathy's dad commented about her growth in knowledge, about the way she could talk about things that he struggled to understand. What did we actually do?    

The company grew like topsy. In 1987-1988 we generated over $250,000 in fees. By the time the brochure was printed in August 1989, monthly fees had passed $75,000 and were growing steadily.

The next photo shows part of the team at work in our new board/conference room. The caption reads:

The Company's approach to undertaking any assignment is to assemble from its Staff and Associates a team of specialised personnel with the mix of expertise and experience most appropriate to the client's needs. Here a group is working on the Australian Industry Involvement Package of a major defence project bid.    

Further comments follow the photo.     Pretty obviously, there is a degree of puff in the caption. But it's also true.

One of our big projects was the development of the industry component of Telecom Defence Systems bid for JORN, the Jindalee Operational Radar Network. This is an over the horizon radar system still central to Australia's defence.

This was pre-email days. Our Armidale team was working with teams in Adelaide and Melbourne. Material came in by fax and went out by fax. We prepared material and faxed it. It then had to be re-keyed at the other end.

The bid was successful. One side effect was that a key staff member included in the above photo, Andrew Davis, left us to join Telecom as the JORN industry program manager. We had trained Andrew from scratch, and it was a loss. Mind you, that's not a criticism of Andrew, just a reflection on the standard of our training!

Everything seemed great, but problems were about to emerge.    

Breaking the glass ceiling

I was quite fascinated by Mark's story Breaking the Glass Ceiling. I won't tell you more. Have a look!

Sunday Snippets - Malcolm Naden, social change with a dash of economics

I will continue the Aymever story later in the week. This Sunday just some snippets. 

Visitor 140,000 arrived yesterday. Normally I say welcome, but in this case it was a spam bot!

The search for fugitive Malcolm Naden continues. This piece by Heath Aston provides an interesting update. The comparisons with Captain Thunderbolt are inevitable. 

One thing that I sometimes try to do in my writing is to make the lessons from my experiences available to others. I also write to try to clarify my own thoughts. Back in May 2010 Sunday Essay - problems for stay-at-home dads discussed the challenges faced by men who chose the primary child care role.

In later discussions, my negative view of the particular challenges faced by men were challenged by women. There had been, I was told, a fundamental shift over the last five years. I was in fact suffering from a generation gap.

I'm not sure. Both girls have been out of school for some time now, so things may have changed. In the meantime, my own views have shifted to a degree.

Both men and women who chose the primary child care role face similar problems. One of the biggest issues for both is that of dependency. This carries risks that I plan to write about at some point.

Many of us who do adopt the primary child care role work from home. Back in November 2006, I looked at the issues here in Teleworking - a personal perspective. I think that this is still a useful post, although again my views have shifted a little. Today I would place much greater weight on the need to maintain consciously one's contact networks, to ensure a life outside the bounds set by family and home office.

Staying with the social change theme, Adele Horin's Retirement is a work in progress provides an interesting perspective on related aspects of the social changes now rippling their way through Australian society.

In 2009, I discussed Don Aitkin's What was it all for?  (Train Reading - Don Aitkin's What was it all for? 1, Sunday Essay - What was it all for? part 2).

Disillusioned by the changes that had taken place in their working life, a remarkable number of Don's class mates at Armidale High School took early retirement. They were able to do so because they had old style superannuation. In retiring early, they also opened the way for the growing number of baby boomers coming through the system.

The position now is very different. Quite simply, a considerable proportion of the now aging baby boomer population cannot afford to retire. They have to work as long as they can. Removal of compulsory retirement ages makes this possible.

The graying of the work force varies from sector to sector. I see it most clearly in the NSW public sector.  There are very few young people in the areas where I have done contract work. And what do I mean by a young person? Someone in their late twenties or early thirties!

I have spoken before about issues associated with an aging population, writing especially from an economics perspective. Here my concern lies with the social aspects of change.

Given my age, I am directly affected by the type of changes that Adele talks about, that I have written about. I think that many of us find the latest round of changes distressing and personally confusing. You see, one of the new tyrannies is that you cannot afford to appear old!

I said earlier that one thing that I sometimes try to do in my writing is to make the lessons from my experiences available to others. I also write to try to clarify my own thoughts.

I am truly fortunate here, for my writing provides both a release and a personal platform.

Finishing on a more mundane note, in Navigating the economic forecasting mess I looked briefly at economic forecasts and forecasting. The weeks since I wrote that post have actually been quite entertaining.

The yo-yo behaviour of economic forecasters and reporters bears a striking resemblance to political reporting on PM Gillard and the Australian Labor Government! One minute your down, the next up.   

Aymever Days 1 - genesis

This post is the start of a story of dreams faded, a memory of a past now diminished. Yet those dreams remain and drive me in my present writing. The posts have been triggered by Carolyn Heinemann, a former staff member, who found and copied the old company brochure to send to me.

This first reproduction shows part of our head office in Armidale. We occupied most of the top floor of this building, including the tower.

Some elements of the story will be familiar to regular readers of this blog, others will not. But I wish to record the story as a tribute to those who joined us in the dream. I still hold the faith that began with what Bob Quiggin came to describe as the Belshaviks, those of us who wanted to reshape Australia's industrial future.

Today when we live in world of narrow performance indicators and a locked-in past, it is helpful to remember that dreams do have an effect even in failure. In the story that follows I am not giving detailed links to my writing. This post is a personal indulgence,  a story that I remember even as the dark clouds sometimes swirl around me.

I am now a writer, someone who uses his pen as his primary weapon. Yet I remember when I did, when the doing was central. Even now in my daily work, in my striving, I try to bring improvement.

The focus may be different. Just at the moment my immediate concern is Aboriginal housing, something far removed from the story in this post. But despite the differences, the drivers remain the same.

The year is 1980. It's a Friday afternoon, about six o'clock.

I had just come across from Treasury to head up the Department of Industry and Commerce's Economic Analysis Branch. In Treasury I had made it a practice always to go to the Social Club Happy Hour - Friday afternoon drinks - because I enjoyed it and it kept me in touch across areas. I was determined to do the same thing in my new Department even though I had noticed that, unlike Treasury, few senior staff attended.

I was interrupted by John Martin, then Director of the Finance and Tax Section in my Branch, Keith Purcell, the First Assistant Secretary in charge of the Policy Division, had received an urgent call from the Minister (Sir Philip Lynch) and wanted to see me at once.

Keith explained to me that Prime Minster Fraser was very worried about the decline in Australian manufacturing and had asked our Minister for urgent advice not just on the causes, but on what might be done. We had to have advice on the Minster's desk first thing Monday morning. So we started calling staff in setting up for a weekend's work.

Quite frankly, this was one of the least satisfying experiences of my professional life. A week end to try to provide sensible advice on this issue was bad enough. But we also lacked the policy framework and supporting analytical tools required to say anything new and useful. So in the end we provided statistics with some fairly superficial supporting analysis. I swore that I would never put myself in this position again.

This next photo shows Liz (not Lis) Noble and John Nightingale on the stairs leading up to the flag tower in the first photo. Liz was Senior Research Officer with our information services business with a special interest in the media. John, then a senior lecturer at the University of New England, was especially interested in technology and the way that one technology replaced another. I still use his concept of competing technology regimes.

At the end of 1980 I went back to the University of New England on leave to work on my PhD. My topic was a biography of my grandfather, David Henry Drummond.

In my posts, I have spoken often of DHD and the influence he had on me. I absorbed many of his views, but by the time I returned to UNE the influence of those views was greatly reduced. They just didn't seem relevant any more.

A funny thing then happened. As I sat in my small office working my way through the papers or worked in my old bedroom at home, my old views re-ignited. Suddenly, I saw the things that had interested me as relevant once more.

Part of the reason for this lay in my renewed residence in the area that I loved. Part, too, lay in my recent experience as senior Commonwealth public servant, for I now filtered Drummond's views and experiences through the prism set by experience. I found myself nodding and saying that's right.

You can see the continuing influence of that experience in my writing today. For example, I describe myself as a New England populist. I would not have done so in 1980. Indeed, I would have been hard pressed to define what the term meant. It just wouldn't have seemed especially relevant.

This next graphic shows a New England new state car sticker. This was one of the two new state stickers on my bedroom window as I wrote. My renewed support for New England self-government was another linked element in my rediscovery of my own past.

I returned to Canberra early in 1983. Later in that year I was given responsibility for the creation of a new branch, the Electronics, Aerospace and Information Industries Branch, to provide a new focus on the high technology industries. This reflected a Departmental worry that too many resources were tied up in declining industries, too few were committed to new industries.

Drawing on my experiences including that episode I described earlier, I tried to develop new policy approaches. I described this in Case studies in public administration.

On 15 March 1987 Denise and I married. Denise was pregnant with Helen, and it seemed an appropriate time to chart new directions.

I had become increasingly frustrated at the early stage impact of what we now call managerialism because the combination of the reassertion of control by the central coordinating agencies with new hierarchical structures in my own department just made it so much harder to get anything new done. Again, you can see the influence on my present writing.

I decided to start a new consulting business in Armidale centred on the electronics, aerospace and information industries. Essentially, I was putting my personal money where my professional mouth had been. The Armidale location reflected my family and New England interests. My contribution to New England development would be the creation of a new high tech node.

I had made a decision in principle, but was still very undecided.

I had a good job and a career path. I was also very comfortably of financially, indeed quite wealthy with guaranteed superannuation, four houses plus a share portfolio. All I had to do was to sit and let compound interest work its miracles. I also met with opposition from my industry colleagues who wanted me just where I was.

A few weeks back I went to farewell drinks with Brian and Irene Lovelock. At the time we are talking about, Brian was a senior executive with Computer Sciences Australia (CSA). Later, he would become an Aymever client, while Irene became one of our associates on the training side.

Bob Cassell was at the drinks. Bob was CEO of CSA at the time Brian was there. The year before the events I am talking about, I organised a group of industry people to go to Armidale for the Picnic Races. Bob flew up in his private plane. Then, and this was something Bob's wife remembered, I took them all sapphire shopping before the races.

Bob was adamant. I must not resign. I had started something worthwhile, and I must try to drive it through despite the growing difficulties.   

In the end, it was a small thing that triggered my move. I had not been especially secret in my musings about new directions. David Charles as head of the Department called me in. What were my intentions?

I started to explain my dilemmas. Then David said: "I don't care what you feel. I am only interested in the impact on the Department." The die was set. That day I gave notice.

In my next post in this series, I will talk about Aymever's early days.              

Zombies walk in Martin Place

Note to readers: I have been copying from a pdf to livewriter then posting, copying the image and then deleting. In doing so, I managed to delete this post. I have restored the post, but could not restore the comments. My apologies! I have added an extra photo at the end. 

Foxtel's new FX pay TV will launch with hit zombie series The Walking Dead.

To mark the launch, zombies walked in Sydney's Martin Place at lunchtime.  The zombie on the left is my youngest, Clare.

Now here in pointing to Clare I was in fact wrong. Regular reader kvd thought Clare was at the back. He was right. She was listed on the left in the original and has a black wig. But she is indeed in the back!

Unlike the events I described in Zombies walk in Kingsford - & elsewhere, this was a paid gig for Clare.

She arose at 3am this morning to catch a bus into the city to be made up. Then there was a long gap before they were all caged.

Breaking from the cage into the lunchtime crowd, they created fear and terror or, perhaps just curiosity.

When I arrived home Clare was happy, but very hoarse from growling! She was happy though, and this is a comment that will only be understood by Australians, because she got to growl at Dicko.

Here is a further photo of the group caged.

For those who do not know who Dicko is - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Dickson_(TV_personality)

In haste

Up early this morning to complete my Express column, again with a newspaper history focus. Now trying to tidy up before departure for work.  Maybe more later!

Australia v Europe

This one came from Brad Holland via Legal Eagle. I couldn't resist copying it.
The map shows Europe, or at least a large part of it, superimposed upon Australia. It gives a good visual feel for the size of the country. The European map itself is slightly odd, mind you. Perhaps dated would be a better word. Yugoslavia is still there, for example. Still, it gives you the picture. 

Postscript. My apologies on this post. The image link has become corrupted and I have been unable to find the original.

Flooding rains, short termism, politics & public policy

On 19 January, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology released its three monthly national seasonal rainfall outlook map. I used to run these maps quite regularly during the long drought that gripped South Eastern Australia.

The Bureau's computer modelling suggested that the north and west of the country could expect wet conditions, with the chances of above median rainfall in the south east about 50 per cent or less.

As I write, Southern Queensland and New England are awash again.

The NSW Government has declared 17 council areas natural disaster zones in the past week, including on the far north and mid-north coast. The photo shows the flood waters at Moree where 10,000 people are isolated by flood waters.

In Queensland, the townships of Mitchell and Roma are awash.

One of the problems during the long dry spell was that people confused a short term phenomenon (the long drought) with a long one (climate change). This led to some of the silly thinking and action that I have complained about before.

It was always going to be the case that floods would return. In New England, inland towns such as Moree and Narrabri have been swamped many times before. The Moree flood may be the highest since 1955, but that just makes the point about past floods. 

The rivers that have their headwaters on the New England Tablelands flow very slowly once they enter the plains because the fall in the country to the Darling-Barwon River is quite small. Water builds up, spreads widely and then drains slowly. The big storage dams in western New England were built in part for flood mitigation purposes.

During the long drought they fell to very low storage levels. Now they are full.

People are funny cattle, to use an old Australian bush phrase. During the long drought many in Sydney (including some officials) argued that we had to depopulate the inland, reduce population to a lower carrying capacity. As the wet returned, many of those same people argued that we should move people out of flood prone areas. Meantime, climate change has largely vanished from popular discussion. Again, we have the same confusion between short and long term.

In my last post, Rinehart, the media & technological change, I wrote:

As human beings, we are hard wired towards stability. We need this at a personal level. So when changes take place in what we see as the natural order of things, there is a sense of shock.

Our human lives are short. Our need for stability means that states that continue for long enough become in our mind the natural order of things. Then things change and we respond.

A child born in Western New England during a long drought may become frightened by the sudden heavy rain. In Sydney presently, people wonder if summer will ever return. This makes it hard to think longer term independent of current events. 

Australian PM Julia Gillard is clearly in trouble. This latest story will give you a feel. She has not been able to establish that centre of calm, that feeling of stability, required to work her way though the challenges she faces. She and her colleagues are constantly responding to the immediate.

Most of the discussions about Ms Gillard's problems are put in a political frame. I think that the real problem lies in the way we have made our underlying structures responsive to the short term and to change.

Certainly politicians bear some of the responsibility, for they constantly want things packaged for immediate effect, react to the immediate. We saw this in NSW over the last ten years of Labor rule when cosmetic packaging became a substitute for policy. Yet it's more than that.

We are confused about the role of our politicians, applying managerial models.

The PM is not in fact the CEO of the country, ministers are not the CEOs of their Departments. Cabinet is not the equivalent of a company board. The head of a government agency is not equivalent to a CEO of private organisation. Departments of state cannot be equated to corporations.

When I read that a department of state such as Treasury has defined a role, call it mission whatever, that is in some way independent of the Department's true role in providing fair and independent advice to its minister and then in implementing the Government's wishes, I shudder.

You see, it can't work. It's actually left a vacuum in which the politicians spin like like weather cocks in the face of conflicting demands. Activity has been substituted for thought, reaction for reasoned response.

I am not talking about some perfect world. Political responses are always important. There will always be compromise. Agency structures will always change. Yet things are different.

In the simpler world of the past, the constant shifts of responsibilities between agencies was just a fact of live. All agencies operated under common rules. Those rules were over-complicated and prescriptive, mandating things as small as the office size or carpet squares for different levels. However, they did provide a common framework that facilitated changes to administrative structures.

The rules changed as they had too. Agencies were given more freedom, senior officials more management discretion. Driven in part by the craze for standards based approach and for documentation (protocols, manuals, procedures etc), one side effect was the proliferation of different systems across agencies. I am not talking just about IT systems, but the whole proliferation from HR through style manuals to project management methodologies through records management and so on.

These new systems became increasingly prescriptive. Increasingly, they became computer embedded. The old system with its acts, regulations and general orders had been replaced by a new complicated system dependent on computing and communication systems for its maintenance and enforcement. 

Today, the CEO of the new agency, and especially the new mega agencies created because we believe that big is better, seeks as soon as possible to integrate all systems and approaches, all visual presentation, into a common whole.

The costs are substantial, the gains often limited.

Within the private sector, one of the recognised problems associated with takeovers or mergers lies in the difficulties created by different and incompatible computer systems. The costs involved in over-coming this can be so high as to either prevent the takeover in the first place or significantly reduce the expected benefits if the takeover does proceed. In the public sector, you have to add the costs of standardising all the administrative and other process systems including the proliferating requirement for reporting.

As a simple example, consider HR policies.

Say that you have five or six policies all with a common base dictated by central rules in that jurisdiction (these central rules themselves have become more complex), but also some variations reflecting the particular circumstances of agencies.

To standardise, and this may be an absolute requirement because it is necessary for the working of the central computer system in the new agency, a team has to be formed to go line by line through the various policies trying identify commonalities and differences and then define a common policy. Other work is then required to alter IT systems to support the new policy.

Replicate this process across multiple policies, processes and systems  and you suddenly get a feel as to costs. Now add to this the impact of constant change in administrative structures and you can see why delivery performance might degrade.

At Federal level in Australia, the Government has chosen to use what we might call a matrix approach.

Each minister has a portfolio. It used to be the case that portfolios represented what we might think of as functional areas. However, political necessity as well as policy desires have led to what I think of as bitsy portfolios. Each portfolio has a bit of this, a bit of that. These bits are shifted each time the ministry changes.

   We also have a situation where ministers or parliamentary secretaries are given responsibilities in other portfolios. We want to promote Fred, but Mary will be upset, so we add a few things to Mary's responsibilities.

It used to be the case that form followed function. That is no longer true, or at least not to the same extent. 

Practicality dictates that there be some relationship between structures and function, but beyond that we have something of a crazy patch-work quilt that can be difficult to understand. This then mandates a matrix approach in an attempt to integrate all the different responsibilities.

So far so good, perhaps. But add to this the fact that Australia is a Federal system in which each jurisdiction has followed the same path and you get a further set of problems.

In a Federal system in which the centre has been increasingly exerting control, integration is important. But you try integrating seven different ever changing matrices. I don't think that it can be done!

In concluding, I want to link the point I have just made back to earlier points in the discussion.

It used to be the case, and to a degree still is, that the public service provided stability and continuity.

By their very nature, policy and programs have a long footprint. If you analyse the Rudd and Gillard Governments, you will find that 90 plus per cent of their policy and program activities are in fact an extension of the Howard Government, just as the Howard Government was an extension of the Hawke-Keating period. Yet the administrative and advisory systems that once provided the required continuity have become less effective.

I think that that's a key reason why Ms Gillard is in trouble.     

Rinehart, the media & technological change

Gina Rinehart is Australia's wealthiest person, with an estimated net worth of $A10.3 billion based on the iron ore interests created by her father. She is presently involved in  a court case with some of her children over control of a family trust.

  A suppression order has been in place preventing reporting of the details. Now court action over the suppression order itself has revealed some details.

Reading Louise Hall's story on this in the Sydney Morning Herald left me feeling rather sad.  The Wilcox cartoon is from that story. As is so often the case, the dispute is about money, with the suppression order linked to fears over security. I quote:

The NSW Supreme Court was told a risk assessment of the family by an international security firm, Control Risks, found reporting of the legal dispute over control of the multibillion-dollar family trust would increase the likelihood of abduction and kidnap for ransom, robbery, protest and harassment from ''criminals, deranged individuals and issue-motivated groups''.

Ms Rinehart's dislike of publicity is well known. For that reason, her foray into the Australian media starting with Channel Ten and now her purchase of a 10 per cent interest in Fairfax Media raised some eyebrows. Now in a piece in the ABC's The Drum by Alan Kohler provides an interesting personal perspective. Mr Kohler worked at one point for Ms Rinehart's father.

While the personal observations were interesting, I was more interested in Alan Kohler's perspective on Fairfax Media itself. I quote:   

As for buying 235 million Fairfax shares at 81.8 cents as an investment - it's a Roulette play, in my view.

Either CEO Greg Hywood pulls it off and Fairfax makes a profitable transition to being a digital company, or he doesn't and the company goes back into receivership and shareholders lose everything. There isn't any middle ground, in my view.

And even if he does pull it off, the stock is unlikely to be a short-term ten-bagger: there are far better speculative plays in the industry Gina Rinehart knows best.

The digital transition for all traditional media companies is more about survival than riches. It's about figuring out how to go from high margins to low margins, not the other way around.

I mentioned in an earlier post that my train reading at present was Rod Kirkpatrick's Country Conscience: A History of the New South Wales Provincial Press 1841-1995. One of the things that I found interesting in that book was the way in which changes in technology have so affected the newspaper press over such a long period.

I am still getting my mind around some of this because I want to build those changes and their effects into my historical writing, and I need to be able to explain things simply.

I have indicated before that I don't necessarily share current pessimism about the future of newspapers, although I agree that people have yet to define a business model that works in the internet age. Having some sense of history is actually quite helpful in considering current media puzzles.

As human beings, we are hard wired towards stability. We need this at a personal level. So when changes take place in what we see as the natural order of things, there is a sense of shock.

The role, organisation and indeed style of the newspaper press has varied greatly over the last 150 years. Take an apparently simple thing, the writing. This has actually changed quite considerably reflecting technology, economic circumstances and the patterns of human life.

As an example, consider the headline. Today this may stretch across columns, even dominate a whole page. This type of headline wasn't possible in the past. The printing technology made it difficult.

Or consider the use of short sentences and paragraphs with the most important point placed first. Newsprint was in short supply during the Second World War, leading to cuts in the size of papers. This required compression in writing and forced changes in the way that stories were written. This wasn't the only reason, but it did contribute to longer term change.

So the latest changes are just another step in a continuing change process. Whether they will in fact be as dramatic as some past changes remains to be seen.       

End month stats - a few interesting past posts

Sometimes I'm just not sure what to write about. I may have no ideas. More often, I have several things running around in my mind. That's actually worse! Then I tend to ramble.

It's end month time. The chart shows the visit stats to end January (yellow) plus page views (yellow plus red). Pretty stable, but up a bit.

There is a growing discrepancy between the site metre and google stats. Google shows a steady rise, but I think that this reflects a rising number of spam visits.

Some of the referrals I find on Google are quite odd. I don't understand, for example, why a Russian sex site should be sending me traffic!

Usually I list the most popular posts in the month. But that actually includes a lot of posts there just because of the title that really aren't worth a visit. Instead, here are three popular posts in the last month that may be worth a visit:

• Culture, locality & prejudice in Sydney. If you know Sydney ,you will laugh.
• Persia, Greece & the Delian League. Just a bit of travel and history.
• Saturday Morning Musings - economic turmoil, education, New Zealand & the Armidale Express. As the title says.

Use and abuse of modelling

In a comment on Navigating the economic forecasting mess, regular commenter kvd pointed me to this piece by Ross Gittins, Damned lies and economic modelling. kvd asked; "Are you moonlighting for Ross Gittens? .. When I read this I could almost swear I've read very similar things right here!"

Over at Winton Bates' place, a strongly favourable comment here on Ross Gittins' writing from another regular commenter, Evan, inspired Where is Ross Gittins coming from? It's kind of a Gittins phase at the moment!

kvd is right, of course, because I have been hammering away at the misuse of modelling as part of my analysis of just what's wrong with current approaches to management and public policy. The Gittins piece is worth reading because it's a very clear exploration of one aspect of the problem.