Posts Tagged ‘government’
November 28th, 2009
Daron Acemoglu, the Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Department of Economics, has written an excellent article for Esquire titled ‘What Makes a Nation Rich? One Economist’s Big Answer’. The hypothesis that Acemoglu proposes is that political and economic freedom are the ingredients for poverty reduction. The argument proposed is certainly compelling.
Acemoglu of course is not the first to make note of the linkage between prosperity and freedom. Each year the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal produce the Index of Economic Freedom that describes the benefits of economic freedom as ‘studies … demonstrate important relationships between economic freedom and positive social and economic values such as per capita income, economic growth rates, human development, democracy, the elimination of poverty, and environmental protection.’ The ten components of Economic Freedom as measured by the Heritage Foundation are; business freedom, trade freedom, fiscal freedom, government size, monetary freedom, investment freedom, financial freedom, property rights, freedom from corruption and labour freedom.
Milton Friedman, in his book ‘Capitalism and Freedom’ takes us back in time to early thinkers on the understanding of political freedom relating to economic prosperity: ‘The relation between political and economic freedom is complex and by no means unilateral. In the early nineteenth century, Bentham and the Philosophical Radicals were inclined to regard political freedom as a means to economic freedom. They believed that the masses were being hampered by the restrictions that were being imposed upon them, and that if political reform gave the bulk of the people the vote, they would do what was good for them, which was to vote for laissez faire.‘
The Objectivist and individual rights evangelist Ayn Rand adds to the evidence “Another current catch-phrase is the complaint that the nations of the world are divided into ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’ Observe that the ‘haves’ are those who have freedom, and that it is freedom that the ‘have-nots’ have not.”.
Acemoglu has written an interesting article which is sure to create debate. It is definitely worth a read.
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October 20th, 2009
Well done to CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization which patented a solution commonly used in wireless networking (specifically WLAN 802.11a, 802.11g and 802.11n). This Australian Government organization has agreed with various corporate users of its technology to a $200 million payout in licensing revenue. These users include Toshiba, Netgear, Buffalo, D-Link, Belkin, SMC, Accton, 3Com, Intel, Microsoft, Asus, Fujitsu and HP. CSIRO shows that Australia has the ability to be leaders in new technologies. Here is the media release from CSIRO:
Australian inventiveness lies at the heart of how millions of people now use wireless networks to access information on a myriad of portable devices.
In homes, offices and cafés, most of the wireless devices we use every day to access the Internet and other networks rely on CSIRO’s solution to a complex radio problem.
“CSIRO’s solution to the ‘multipath problem’ and its subsequent commercialisation ranks as one of the most significant achievements in CSIRO’s 82 year history,” CSIRO chairman Dr John Stocker says.
“The technology is used in over 800 million devices right now and its use is rapidly expanding.”
Today at a ceremony in Melbourne, the scientific, commercial and legal teams responsible for the achievement will receive CSIRO’s highest honour: the Chairman’s Medal for Research Achievement.
One of the main problems the team managed to solve was ’multipathing’.
“You might imagine that the little box with the flashing lights that powers your home wireless network is simply beaming information straight to your laptop,” CSIRO’s Dr John O’Sullivan, leader of the scientific team says.
“In reality the radio waves travel in all directions, bouncing off walls, furniture and people – making it very hard to deliver a clear signal to the receiver.”
The team solved this problem by adapting ideas that had their roots in radioastronomy and the Dell search for exploding black holes.
“I was inspired to think about ways of cleaning up smeared radio signals to make searching for short pulses like those from exploding black holes easier,” Dr O’Sullivan says.
“We ended up building a ‘fast Fourier transform’ chip to do these sorts of processing tasks efficiently and fast. That proved to be the key to untangling the web of wireless signals so we could build a workable high speed wireless local area network (WLAN).”
A US patent was granted in 1996 and, in 1999, one of the first modern international standards for WLAN (IEEE 802.11a) relied on the technology covered by CSIRO’s patent for its implementation. In 2001 the first products entered the market.
“CSIRO set out to encourage the industry to take licenses for the use of its patented technology,” Mr Nigel Poole, CSIRO Executive Director, Commercial says.
“When that did not prove successful, we initiated legal proceedings which then led to proceedings being initiated against CSIRO.
“The result earlier this year was that 14 companies settled with CSIRO under confidential terms. The revenue arising from these settlements to date is approximately $A200 million.
“Soon an announcement will be made about how Australian research will benefit from this success.”
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Tags: Australia, Australian, government, IEEE, Intel, Internet, Microsoft, nbn, networking, Patents, radioastronomy, Research, wireless, WLAN | 
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September 30th, 2009
The global economic crisis has resulted in the collapse of numerous large companies. The most prominent of these have been those in the Finance sector (e.g. banks). The banks in particular have become far more risk averse so to minimize adverse risk of loan defaults. Of course this lowering of risk tolerance has had a devastating effect on small business.
I have spoken to a few small business owners who are not able to get finance for their businesses due to reduced risk appetite by the banks. This is devastating for small business and many small businesses are likely to collapse as a result. It is also so much more difficult to get finance to start new businesses now and this directly affects rates of unemployment and taxes received by the government.
But the joke of all this is that the large organizations such as Ford and General Motors (in Australia, the U.S.A and elsewhere), AIG, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, RBS, Northern Rock and so on are the ones getting bailed out by governments when they’re about to fail. What about small business, the people that really take on substantial risk? Small business is critical to the economy and the people who own small businesses are generally very exposed the external economic environment. The owners of small business also earn far less than the executives of large corporations yet take on so much more risk. Small business is the economic base of any free market (or relatively free market) economy and employs substantial numbers of people. I’m against substantial intervention by the government in the economy (hey, the economic crisis was caused by government meddling in the economy in the first place) but if the government insists on getting involved then why isn’t it spending an equal amount on, or doing as much for, small business as it is on large business (in fairness, governments are doing bits to help small business)?
Come on governments; stop favoring big business and help the true drivers of the economy; small business!
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September 9th, 2009
Here’s a great idea; lower prices and repayments to stimulate buying! This is a recipe that is sure to work … and this is exactly what the Australian Government considers as successful aversion of economic disaster.
The Australian Government (Federal and Local) knew/thought they had to do something bold to avoid economic disaster in the recent economic turmoil so decided to manipulate housing markets by offering thousands of dollars to first time buyers (as a cash advance so very small deposits are needed to buy houses after the government handout). The government is very proud that house prices have held up relatively well whilst house prices in many other countries have plummeted. Of course interest rates have been falling at the same time so not only is a small deposit needed to buy but also repayments are at an all time low. This week the government has been shouting out its ‘success’ at averting worse economic performance.
Mmm … so what happens when interest rates rise? People have over extended themselves to buy houses because of the government giving cash advances to buy. At the same time repayments were calculated using the lowest interest rates in a very long time. Interest rates will rise in the near term which will have a significant effect on those who have extended their monthly budgets to afford the repayments.
Oh dear, it looks like all the government has really done is create a false bubble of house buying (isn’t this exactly what caused the recent financial/economic troubles in the first place?). The worst is yet to come in the housing market methinks!
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July 8th, 2009
The past ten days has seen three different but equally interesting Information Security alerts. Two involve major financial institutions (Goldman Sachs and Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA)) and one the South Korean Government.
Goldman Sachs:
Sergey Aleynikov, a dual US and Russian citizen, is charged with stealing a ‘trading code’ from Goldman Sachs and transferring the code to a server in Germany. Use of the trading code by unscrupulous parties could result in manipulation of markets and millions of dollars in costs to Goldman Sachs.
CBA:
Here in Australia, CBA was forced to take its online banking portal, NetBank, offline due to “exceptionally high volumes of traffic … some of which appears to be malicious” on the 28th June.
South Korea:
It was announced in South Korea today that there had been a significant number of ‘distributed denial of service’ attacks overnight resulting in certain government websites being unavailable. As Bloomberg describes the circumstances: ‘The attacks were caused by so-called “distributed denial of service,” which overwhelms Internet sites by generating large amounts of traffic through personal computers’. News Limited added: ‘every day the [South Korean] military counters an average of 10,450 hacking attempts and 81,700 computer virus infections in addition to other cases’.
What can Small Business do about the Risk?
Frightening stuff! So what can small businesses do to reduce these types of risk; use reputable IT and Telecoms Service Providers, use personal firewalls, keep anti-virus and online protection software up to date, keep software updated (e.g. Windows) to name a few. Most of all however be vigilant and aware of the dangers. The Information Pirates are out there to harm you and your business!
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Tags: anti-virus, Australia, commonwealth bank of australia, computer virus infections, computers news, denial of service, dos, goldman sachs, government, government websites, information pirate, information security, it, korea, news limited, personal computers, ping, pirate attacks, security, south korea, south korean government, Trojan |
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