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Innovation in Australia part 1 of 3 - early beginnings
Australia in the years following European settlement was so markedly different from today. So much that we take for granted in food production, medicine, communications transport and much else had not been developed. The early settlers' approach to innovation was shackled by a colonial dependence on imported technology and a focus on individuals rather than any collective endeavour. Despite this, Australia had its inventors tinkering and making great strides, some of which were at the forefront of the world's developing technologies. What was their secret? What needs to happen now? And why have Australians not heard of Henry Sutton, described by Professor Mark Dodgson, presenter of this series, as possibly one of the greatest inventors in history?
Robyn Williams: Okay then Australia, what do you want to be; the lucky country or the mucky country? Digging dirt or digging ideas? Donald Horne asked the question, as did Barry Jones, now it's Catherine Livingstone and Mark Dodgson. This is The Science Show on the future of Australian brains.
Just look at the cover of last week's Economist magazine, it shows a thinking man sitting on the loo. He's thinking, 'Will we ever invent anything this useful again?' And lower down near the outflow pipe it says, 'The growing debate about dwindling innovation.' Dwindling? Well, put aside all those iGadgets and so-called smart toys, what about the new systems and machines we really need to make life work? Jennifer Westacott, chief executive of the Business Council of Australia put it like this on Big Ideas on RN before Christmas:
Jennifer Westacott: Our highly experienced, globally connected chief executives believe Australia is well placed to become the most exceptional country on Earth. And more than at any time in our history, our endowment of our natural resources, our human capital, our adjacency to Asia, and our capacity to adapt and innovate have given us the chance to do this on our own terms. But it won't happen on autopilot.
Our thinking has been influenced by more recent thinking about the drivers of growth, which has evolved from a focus on physical capital to recognise the role of ideas, innovation, institutions, people and population and human capital as the key drivers of well-managed growth into the future.
The first is unleashing innovation to create new forms of wealth. The challenge in the short term is twofold: how do we talk about innovation without slipping into a tired old discussion about R&D, invention and subsidies. Real innovation, the kind of innovation we're talking about in our vision, happens through collaboration, through the right incentives, the flow of ideas and the readiness to make the most out of serendipity.
Mostly it involves stimulating and tapping into the innovation of the Australian people. We need to talk about the environment that allows innovation to flourish, things like our regulation, our skills and capability, our broad fiscal and tax settings, and the obvious value of competitive pressures to do better. This is the challenge and the opportunity of innovation, and it will be the centrepiece of the Business Council's long-term vision.
The second thing we need to get right concerns realising the potential of people and labour markets. It involves the quality and availability of education, training and skills that equips people to fully participate and achieve their aspirations.
Australian governments have taken a lot of action in this area, particularly on the skills front. We will focus on the kind of workplaces we need for the future. You can't capture the benefits of innovation and technology if you can't capture them at the workplace level.
In the short term there are three specific areas we believe need addressing: Asian literacy, maths and science, and the soft skills like problem-solving that allow people and businesses and the nation to adapt well to change. It's also time, in our view, to change the conversation about workplace relations so we can have a positive and constructive dialogue about the workplaces of the future.
Robyn Williams: Jennifer Westacott, CEO of the Business Council of Australia. And there's plenty to do to realise that ambition. Four million of the Australian workforce is functionally illiterate. Our schools don't compare well in maths and science as we look around the region. As for innovation itself, this is Nicky Phillips from the Sydney Morning Herald who's written extensively on the topic.
Nicky Phillips: Within the walls of Australia's universities and institutes, brilliant minds produce world-class research. We are global leaders in pancreatic cancer, solar photovoltaics and quantum computing, to name a few. But when it comes time to transform ideas beyond the laboratory bench into a commercial product or service, the country fails to launch.
While scientists here publish peer-reviewed papers at almost double the OECD average, Australia is granted just 18 patents per million people each year. A patent is a measure of innovation success. This compares to 53 patents per million people annually in the United States, and 90 per million in Sweden. Australia: 18. This problem is not new, but as mining companies empty our soils of valuable minerals, many in the research industry agree Australia's next resource needs to be its brain power.
The former Queensland premier Peter Beattie, now the director of the Medical Research Commercialisation Fund, says that in this century of innovation, Australia risks being left behind. ''We have got to better commercialise our research,'' says Beattie, who re-branded Queensland 'The Smart State' during his premiership.
On the 2012 Global Innovation Index, which is co-published by the business school INSEAD and a United Nations agency, Australia ranked 23rd overall. Not a bad result. But in terms of innovation efficiency, which is the number of innovations the country generates compared to its regulatory environment and its number of skilled innovation workers, we ranked 107th out of 141 countries. That's behind Georgia, Malawi and Colombia.
The reasons behind our struggle to reap financial and social benefits from research are complex. For one, the research culture in Australia sees almost three-quarters of all researchers spend their careers in academia rather than industry. Here scientists expect to become university professors, get tenure and grow old. Compare that to the United States where 'researcher' is synonymous with 'entrepreneur'.
Part of the problem is the federal government's research funding structure. Academics who publish their work in journals are rewarded with grants. There are few incentives for those who choose to innovate. You'd be hard pressed to find anyone in the science industry who would argue that blue-sky research should not be funded. You never know when a study on exploding black holes will transform into wi-fi technology. But of the roughly $9 billion of public money that funds research each year, only 2% is spent developing those results into a commercial product. A venture capital market which provides investment for medical and technology start-ups around the world barely exists in Australia. Peter Beattie and several others believe Australia's superannuation funds should invest some of their billions of dollars into science and medical start-ups.
Australia's chief scientist, Ian Chubb, acknowledges the country has failed to capitalise on its research for decades. But the solution is far from simple, he says. Last year the Australian Research Committee released a national investment plan. The document details the country's first whole-of-government research strategy, which aims to increase the country's productivity as well as address some of the key challenges we face as a nation.
In April the committee will hand science minister Chris Evans a list of priorities. While specific targets sound good in theory, it means there will be winners and losers. But a coordinated research plan is vital to improve the nation's innovation success rate.
Other changes (and no one is suggesting they'll be easy or quick) will mean more researchers spend their careers within industry or business, but the government will need to provide incentives for them to do so.
On The Science Show over the next three weeks Professor Mark Dodgson, director of the Technology and Innovation Management Centre at the University of Queensland Business School, will expand on some of these problems.
Robyn Williams: Nicky Phillips from The Sydney Morning Herald. And before we hear from Mark Dodgson, here are some of the voices you'll hear in this exploration. Can you guess who they are? The first one is easy.
Barack Obama: We have to harness the potential, the innovative and creative spirit that's waiting to be awakened all across America. That's how we'll rebuild this economy stronger than before, strong enough to avoid the cycles of boom and bust that have wreaked so much havoc on our economy, strong enough to support the jobs of the 21st century, and strong enough to unleash prosperity for everybody, not just some.
Geoffrey Blainey: The role of the foreigner in Australian mining has changed from generation to generation. It will change again. But I don't see much likelihood of us owning more in the near future because as a nation we don't understand what it takes. We think that a mine is discovered through luck. In fact it's discovered more through effort and intelligence. And until we're willing to put aside this idea that luck is all important, to apply more of the intelligence, we're still going to have large areas of Australia mined by foreign companies.
Catherine Livingstone: That's the nature of innovation. Innovation is not linear, it's chaotic. There's a great deal of serendipity, it relies on a pretty active ecosystem and if there's any defect in that ecosystem, the idea might not survive, might get a bit injured, but the ecosystem hopefully will eventually pick it up and out it comes, but not from the original source in a linear way.
Barack Obama: We want our kids to grow up in a country where they have access to the best schools and the best teachers, a country that lives up to its legacy as the global leader in technology and discovery and innovation, with all the good jobs and new businesses that follow.
Catherine Livingstone: I think with innovation, it's a spectrum. You can have the tweaking, as you describe it, which is the incremental innovation and then you can go to the other end of the spectrum where you get the transformational, the really new idea.
Now, if you're a business, a company, your bread and butter is going to be from incremental innovation in between those points where you can deliver the transformational. But if you just relied on the transformational it may not happen, you may not find it, you can't predict that you're going to achieve it, and its market value erodes over time. When it comes out it's very highly valued, you can command a price premium, but the consumers get accustomed to it being there and three or four years later it's just as remarkable but the preparedness to pay a price premium may not be there.
So you need to underpin that erosion with the ongoing incremental innovation, which is the tweaking, and then hopefully, if your R&D systems and collaboration networks are healthy and you've chosen the right directions, you'll come up with the next phase of transformational innovation for your business. But I think you have to do both.
Howard Florey: I get much more credit than I deserve in this matter, because I'm quite clear that nothing would have gone along, except for a group of about five or six people, not a big group, with some technicians, and that was sufficient to discover all the essential points about penicillin. Well, it happened to come at a very fortunate time, that is at the beginning of the war. This is another thing that's stated, that we did this because of the war. This is not true at all.
Robyn Williams: The Australian genius Howard Florey. Before him, Catherine Livingstone, Geoffrey Blainey, and the other bloke.
And so to Mark Dodgson from the Business School at the University of Queensland. He spent his life studying innovation. And it begins with Australia's history.
Mark Dodgson: We in Australia have a history of widespread ingenuity and inventiveness, but our capacity to be innovative—that is to successfully apply our ideas—is patchy and piecemeal. In these programs I shall discuss the highs and lows of innovation throughout our history and argue that we have to be much more rigorous and systematic in our approaches to innovation to deal with the massive social challenges that confront our economy, our environment, and the quality of our lives. Along the way we shall meet some astonishing people who deserve to be known and appreciated much better. We'll meet Henry Sutton, the genius from Ballarat, who may well have invented television, and we'll talk about Arthur Bishop whose war-time experiences of keeping Beaufort bombers flying their missions developed expertise that ended up in one-in-five of the world's cars.
We will also talk about what innovation means for us, individually and collectively. Innovation has quite simply radically changed our worlds for the better over the past 150 years. When my father was born there was no penicillin, television or frozen food. When my grandfather was born there were no radios, aeroplanes or internal combustion engines. My great-grandfather was born into a world without light bulbs, cars or bicycles, telephones, refrigerators or typewriters. His life had more in common with a Roman peasant than with mine. That our lives have improved immeasurably in the course of four generations can be explained in large part because of innovation.
If you want to see the personal value of innovation there's no better place than to look at the extraordinarily moving videos of children hearing for the first time after having a Cochlear implant. Innovation helps the deaf hear and is increasingly helping the blind see. We live longer and healthier lives as a result of innovation. Without innovation our companies and our economy shrink and die and we no longer have the ability to pay for the educational and health services we enjoy. The novelty and changes of innovation bring fun into our lives. In a world of numbing uniformity, routine and bureaucracy, innovation permits us to get excited.
I know that by emphasising the benefits of innovation I'll antagonise those legitimately concerned with its dangers. It has after all given us weapons of mass destruction and more than enough means to pollute ourselves out of existence. But while I'll talk about the positive, I'll be conscious of the negative. I'll bear in mind the life's work of Thomas Midgely and his contributions to car engines and refrigerators that helped create enormous global industries and provided mobility and improved nutrition for billions. Unfortunately, his contributions to engines involved putting lead in petrol and he was responsible for putting chlorofluorocarbons in fridges. The damage his innovations wreaked are inestimable. An inventor to the end, to help him move in bed after he contracted polio he developed a system of ropes and pullies that misbehaved badly and strangled him to death. There are often two sides to the coin that is innovation.
The argument I'm going to develop is that for us to become better innovators, upon which so much depends, and where we accentuate the positive and mitigate the negative, we need to become more professional and organised in our approaches to innovation, in business, government and education. This may seem counter-intuitive. Surely innovation requires creativity and unconstrained imagination? It does, but it also requires discipline in its management, and especially important is the way organisations and people have to collaborate with one another more effectively.
Remember the famous line in the great Paul Newman film Cool Hand Luke: 'What we have here is a failure to communicate'? Well, my argument is what we have here in Australia is a failure to collaborate.
In this first program, I'm going to talk about our earliest history of innovation following European settlement. The discovery of Australia by the British resulted, of course, from a scientific experiment: the decision of the Royal Society to send Captain James Cook to observe the transit of Venus across the Sun. I begin my reflections on innovation in 1789, a year after the arrival of the First Fleet, when Captain Arthur Phillip sent back to England a package of clay from Sydney Cove. He sent it to the potter Josiah Wedgwood, one of England's greatest figures of the Industrial Revolution, who put his leading artist to work to produce a medallion from the clay. Examples of these medallions sit in the Mitchell Library in Sydney and are inscribed: 'Hope encouraging art and labour under the influence of peace, to pursue the employments necessary to give security and happiness to an infant settlement'. Security and happiness, Wedgwood believed, resulted from inventive work that was useful and could be traded. In today's language, he was talking about innovation, and then as now our standard of living and quality of life depends crucially upon it.
Innovation—the successful application of new ideas—is what makes science and research useful. Although my definition is relatively simple, in reality it turns out to be quite complicated. As its focus is successful application, it doesn't include some very good ideas that aren't turned into innovation. There are always problems in deciding what is new. Newton said he could see so far because he stood on the shoulders of giants, and innovation is the same in that it builds on existing knowledge and technologies. Innovation is a terribly imprecise word, and I'll rely on the advice of the great Cambridge economist, Joan Robinson, when she said, 'There is no advantage (and much error) in making definitions of words more precise than the subject they refer to.'
We do, however, have to distinguish between invention and innovation, as they often get confused. Invention is having and developing an idea and innovation is successfully applying it to create value, with highly consequential results. It was the Australian scientist Howard Florey and his team that developed penicillin, but it was American corporations that reaped the economic benefits from their work.
Here we hear Howard Florey talking about his discovery:
Howard Florey: My first interest was in chemistry, and I think I had some idea of doing research. I might have been 12 when this came…I remember my sister saying, 'Oh, you mean you'd like to be a sort of Pasteur,' and I didn't know what that meant. I remember my father consulting the headmaster at St Peter's and he said, 'Oh no, you can't go into chemistry, there is no outlet in Australia,' which was probably true in those days. And it was then that my thoughts turned to medicine.
There were a lot of misconceptions about medical research. People sometimes think that I and the others worked on penicillin because we were interested in suffering humanity. I don't think it ever crossed our minds about suffering humanity. This was an interesting scientific exercise, and because it was of some use in medicine it's very gratifying, but this was not the reason that we started working on it.
Yes, they're very gratified if it's of use, but it's not essential, and the same thing would apply to penicillin. I suppose we're all very glad now that it works, but then you've got to see the reverse side of the medal because I am now accused of being partly responsible for the population explosion, which is one of the most devastating things that the world has got to face for the rest of this century.
Mark Dodgson: Doug Waterhouse, a CSIRO scientist, developed the active ingredient of the insect repellent Aerogard, but it was the Mortein company that made millions from it, and reputedly generously and gratefully rewarded Waterhouse with a box of its aerosol cans.
Much can be learned about how we innovate in Australia from our early experiences with the mining industry in the 19th century. As Geoffrey Blainey has shown in his wonderful studies of the history of mining, our colonial status initially prevented the exploration for mineral resources. The Crown owned all gold and silver mines, and prospectors attempting to search for precious metals could be arrested for trespass. When the Crown finally figured out that there was money to be made, it introduced punitive licensing laws that led to the events of the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat.
Here we hear Geoffrey Blainey:
Geoffrey Blainey: Eureka is this nation's greatest source of slogans and symbols, but this flag is coloured with contradictions. The people who fought at Eureka were certainly public spirited, but then again they were tax evaders on the grand scale. The people at Eureka were ordinary miners, everyday Australians, but most of them were also small capitalists. They were mine owners. But the greatest somersault in the history of Eureka is to see the Eureka flag waved at the multinational companies because so many of the men who fought at Eureka were themselves multinationals, people who had come to this country specifically to dig gold and hoped as soon as they found enough to leave Australia forever.
Mark Dodgson: The historian Manning Clark also brings innovation into his consideration of the events at Eureka. He compares Ballarat, where there was an abhorrence of new technology such as steam engines, and Bendigo where there was more machinery and hence greater security of wages.
Migrants from Cornwall dominated our early mining industry. Our reliance on these imported artisans, who never appreciated the need for metallurgical or engineering skill, explains our early lack of innovativeness. The early digger, Clark contended, was a 'man of resource, an improviser, but not an inventor'. 'Colonial peoples', he argued, 'not only did not make their own history: their very status, their dependence on Mr Mother Country drained away their creative energies. Their Britishness condemned them to dependence, to that state of pupillage and infancy out of which neither prophets nor inventors could grow.'
Mine owners at the time had no scientific understanding and interest and were generally hostile to new methods. They preferred experience to qualifications and were highly averse to the larger pay packets demanded by the skilled worker. An attempt was made to emulate London's Royal School of Mines with the creation of the Ballarat School of Mines, but it quickly moved from its broad educational objectives towards the provision of technical training with immediate practical results.
We were not without appreciation of the value of innovation. Manning Clark's six-volume History of Australia provides numbers of examples of how important science, technology and innovation could be. Clark refers to an 1857 speech by Sydney University's Professor John Wooley, in which he recognised: 'it was science that made the barren field bear a hundredfold; science gave medicine to the sick, lessened toil, removed dangers, multiplied comforts'. He went on to tell his audience that science furnished 'a most powerful though indirect motive to good conduct, by providing ready employment and an honest field of ambition to the poorest and most laborious'.
Clark emphasises the important potential of innovation, arguing at the turn of the 19th century that 'innovations in their material settings held out the promise of greater profits, greater luxuries and greater ease.' They offered a point of distinction from the mother country, 'a society which lived off borrowed grandeur (and) opted for the defence of the established order rather than explore in the natural sciences and mathematics the keys to future power in the world.'
He saw how 'technical change was laying the foundation for the replacement of human labour by the machine: the lawn mower, the sewing machine and ready-to-wear clothing were all part of the wonders of the age, and the instruments for the destruction of Old Australia—the Australia of material backwardness and isolation.' At the same time, innovations were transforming business and contributing 'to the bourgeois desire and appetite for profit'. He tells, for example, how 'In 1882 the Sydney Exchange Company had installed communication by telephone between the Stock Exchange and the principal wharves of the harbour, thus introducing a great saving of time and expense in the transaction of business.' He relates how in 1884 Frederic Wolseley in partnership with a certain John Howard began to successfully market a shearing machine based on the former's patent. Shearing machines dramatically increased wool production, and the number of sheep in Australia rose from 21 million in 1861 to 107 million in 1891.
Clark was highly conscious of the social context and significance of innovation. The steamship, railway, agricultural machinery, gas lighting, electricity, telephone, horseless carriage and phonograph, he argued, all accentuated feelings of Western superiority over Australia's Indigenous population.
Here we hear Manning Clark:
Manning Clark: We don't know what went on in the minds of Aborigines. We get hints of their anger, their grief and their dismay that nothing they could do could end the degradation of their people. We get hints too from time to time of why these two people couldn't speak to each other. They were like people on different sides of a thick plate glass, they were only able to see the grief and the hatred on each other's faces, they couldn't hear, let alone understand what was being said. We can see now that they were mighty opposites; one believed in work to accumulate a surplus, the other, by an odd irony, seemed to act on Christ's remarks about 'sufficient unto the day'.
We have, for example, the case of the Aborigine telling a squatter in Victoria in the 1850s that if he stayed with his own people he'd work two days in the week, but if you joined the white man's society he'd be working six days a week. So he chose his own people. The white men were individualists, the Aborigines were communalists. The Aborigine preferred his own way of life to becoming a dish and bottle washer in the white man's world: that is to say, to occupying permanently the bottom rung in the ladder of the white man's society.
In the period after the discovery of gold, this history of the relations between the whites and the blacks took on an even more painful form. That was the period when the white man became even more addicted to and boastful about his material progress with the coming of the railway and the electric telegraph to the mighty bush. Yet once again the Aborigines seemed quite incapable of and quite uninterested in sharing this material progress.
In Sydney an Aborigine caged money from the men and women who were driving in their gorgeous carriages along the Old South Road into the city. In Hobart the Lord Bishop of Tasmania, Francis Russell Nixon, took a basket of fruit each week to the 11 or 12 survivors out of the 5,000 in Tasmania, and wore on his face the smile of a love of Christ's man as he offered a piece of fruit to each of these human wrecks who were eking out a filthy existence in an old convict hut at Oyster Cove.
In Melbourne, black men and women with filthy frizzy hair and degraded brutal faces, their repulsive bodies covered with rags, sometimes wearing on their heads that symbol of one of the glories of the white man's society, the top hat, they stagger down Collins Street, their brains so befuddled by alcohol they bumped up against the splendid new buildings the white man had just erected.
By then the whistle of the steam engine was replacing the screech of the cockatoo and the yell of the savage. White men were queuing up to buy tickets for the opera or gathering outside the telegraph office in Melbourne to hear the result of the English Derby. By contrast, the original inhabitants of the desert of Australia had been reduced to being gapers at the wonders of a civilisation in which they felt themselves to be mighty strangers.
Robyn Williams: Professor Manning Clark from his Boyer Lectures in 1977. And this is The Science Show on RN and the first in our series on innovation in 2013, presented by Professor Mark Dodgson from the Business School at the University of Queensland.
Mark Dodgson: We were producing our own inventive geniuses. Walk into Sydney's Powerhouse Museum and look up and you see a model of Lawrence Hargraves flying his box kites in the 1890s. His research inspired the Wright Brothers and their first flight and Alexander Graham Bell's development of the telephone. Perhaps our greatest inventor then, and perhaps even today, is Henry Sutton (1856-1912). Although there are some considerable uncertainties about his contribution due to the isolation in which he worked, there are some grounds for claiming he may well have been one of the greatest inventors of all time.
Educated by his mother until age 11 Sutton was thereafter self-taught. His list of inventions is extensive: a clockwork helicopter that mimics the flight of birds, an electric continuous current dynamo, a storage battery, photo-lithography and colour printing process, a vacuum pump, telegraph facsimile, and a long distance wireless system that attracted immediate interest from the Australian and US navies. Because of concern for secrecy, the extent to which his communications system was used by the military gets murky.
Sutton is reputed to have been hard on the heels of Edison's development of the carbon filament lamp, to have invented a torpedo which failed to get funded, experimented with mineral flotation processes before it was developed for use in the mining industry, photographed the cholera germ, designed and helped build Australia's first hydraulic lift, developed, built and drove a number of motorcycles and two cars with carburettors of his own design, and he built the world's first portable radio with a range of 500 yards.
A year after Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone, Sutton had experimented with 20 different telephones, 16 of which were patented by others. Bell visited Ballarat and was apparently hugely impressed to see a complete telephone system installed by Sutton in his family's business. Sutton also set up what was probably the first telephone system at an educational institution at the Ballarat School of Mines where he worked. His interests were broad and eclectic. According to his biographer, his great granddaughter, Lorayne Branch, amongst his many other achievements he established Victoria's scientific instrument industry and founded the Automobile Club of Victoria.
Of all Sutton's inventions perhaps the most extraordinary is the telephane. According to the Global History Network of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the telephane was a forerunner to television, developed three years before its inventor, John Logie Baird, was born. Sutton used his knowledge of optics to use the telegraph to transmit images. Victoria's Government Astronomer is reported to have seen a demonstration of the telephane transmitting the Melbourne Cup to Ballarat in 1885. It was demonstrated in England, France and America, and Baird used Sutton's principles when he developed the television.
Geniuses such as Sutton are a rare breed and dance to their own tune. As an indicator of his energy and drive, I love the quote in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, which describes how Sutton worked tirelessly with 'daylight sometimes surprising him every day for a week'.
Returning to the crucial distinction between invention and innovation, Lawrence Hargraves refused to patent his work in order to gain financially from it, believing it limited the development of science. His American admirers were not so reticent. Henry Sutton travelled overseas and met Bell, Edison and Tesla, but unlike them he rarely applied for patents because he wanted to benefit fellow workers in science. His American counterparts patented and commercialised their inventions, creating massive companies such as Bell Telephone and General Electric.
Industry gradually improved its capacity to be innovative throughout the 19th century. Returning to the mining industry, the introduction of the imported technique of cyanide processing to extract gold in the 1890s is revealing. Australia lagged other countries, such as the Transvaal, in using this technology, explained in part because of the comparative distances between mines and the significantly divergent geochemical characteristics of its ore bodies. It was Kalgoorlie that took the lead, explained by its isolation, extremely harsh conditions and highly variable deposits. Geoffrey Blainey says it was 'Kalgoorlie's success in mastering rebellious ores (that) made it probably the world's leading goldfield in metallurgy'.
Sarah Vandermark's study of innovation in Australian mining argues the successful transfer of cyanide processing occurred because of the creation of the skills, knowledge and infrastructure that supported radical innovation. That is not to say it did not have to overcome numerous hurdles, such as the prejudice on the part of mine managers against new scientifically-based methods and the lack of collaboration between research in mine sites, but the fact they were overcome is explained by the development of a system of innovation created because, despite all the obstacles, the returns from innovation were so immediate and obvious.
In contrast to cyanide processing, an imported technology, the use of a flotation process to capture lead, zinc and copper was essentially an Australian innovation, albeit one wrapped in years of patent disputes. The great winner was Broken Hill, where companies such as BHP invested substantially over many years to overcome the problem of extraordinary richness of deposits and weak recovery methods. This technology in many ways reveals Australia coming of age, in investing in research and engineering to develop world-leading, pioneering technology. By the first decade of the 20th century, Australia led the world in technological innovation in minerals processing, and we continue to be right at the forefront with innovations such as the Jameson Cell, developed in the 1980s by Professor Graeme Jameson at the University of Newcastle.
The 19th century also saw us becoming increasingly innovative in agriculture, stimulated by the conditions in Australia that were unsuitable for European commercial plants. The economist Bob Gregory tells of how, for example, British wheat varieties did not take to Australian soil, and in 1901 William Farrer crossed Indian and English varieties to solve the problem. He describes how native and imported grasses did not support grazing, and how the discovery of subterranean clover and superphosphate overcame the difficulty. He describes John Ridley's 1842 grain stripper, with which four men in one day could do the work of two during a whole harvesting season, and HV McKay's invention of the combine harvester, which could strip, thresh and clean grain in one continuous operation. This led to the creation of Australia's largest farm machinery manufacturer, which like so many of our high-profile successful firms was acquired by a large overseas company.
History matters, and in this first program I have referred to the constraints on our approach to innovation brought about by our colonial dependence and reliance on importing technology. We developed a focus on the practical efforts of individuals rather than the collective and shared endeavours that innovation requires, and where we did innovate it was in response to obvious and overwhelming opportunities. In the next program I'll discuss how these legacies continued well into the 1980s, and some still linger today.
Robyn Williams: Mark Dodgson in Brisbane, and I'll talk to him about those ideas in a minute.
Now for our PhD, as we do every week, and this shows how far we've come: Seimeng Lai is a soldier from Singapore and he's doing his doctorate at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra on how those computer games can help train military men and women.
Seimeng Lai: I'm a soldier armed with a rifle, I'm a magician who can cast a spell, I'm a soccer player scoring a goal, and I'm a street racer driving in the streets at top speed. These are some of the many experiences I can have as a videogame player. Videogames, much like movies and storybooks, place their users in a fictional world. In videogames users not only get to see, hear or read about what happens, they are able to act, to move, to participate and make decisions in this digitally created virtual environment.
Hi, I'm Seimeng Lai, and in my PhD I'm examining how interactions with such digital virtual environments might impact its users. Videogames have become part of everyday life in modern societies. The world's videogame industry is estimated to have reached US$74 billion in 2011. In Australia it's estimated that 88% of households play videogames. Videogames can be found almost everywhere in our society, from the videogame console installed on our 72-inch flatscreen TV, to a simple application on our smart phones. The influence of videogames has become far-reaching, and with continual advances in technology, this influence is unlikely to diminish in the near future. Furthermore, the establishment of connectivity via the internet within these videogames has allowed users to not only interact with this digital virtual environment but also others which we commonly call avatars.
Videogames are not the only digital virtual environments. In fact, the origins of videogames can be found within the military. The military uses these digital virtual environments for various simulations, ranging from flying a plane to shooting a rifle. They even use these digital virtual environments to simulate various battle scenarios. Simulation training helps soldiers improve their various skills, allowing them to execute these actions almost on instinct. This helps to prepare them for actual physical situations that they might face. At the same time that soldiers are getting better with these various drills, teenagers are getting better with their videogames, and even toddlers are getting better at Angry Birds.
As users immerse themselves and interact with these digital virtual environments, they acquire what we call habits. As living beings we are capable of acquiring habits. As we repeat or continue a change, our proficiency increases and our effort decreases. We develop a tendency to reproduce that change and it gradually becomes second nature to us. For example, when we first to learn how to ride a bike it takes a lot of effort to balance ourselves without falling over. Through repetition we gradually realise that cycling has become automatic, we no longer need to think about how to balance ourselves, our body is naturally able to cycle.
In my PhD I will examine the various experiences of military simulation in comparison with videogames. I hypothesise that when we interact with these digital virtual environments we not only develop habits in relation to these various skills but through our repeated interactions with these digital virtual environments we will induce habits that shape the way we perceive and feel in our physical environments by influencing the way we perceive and feel. Digital virtual environments may ultimately predetermine our social and cultural behaviours in our physical environments. This may have profound implications for how we understand people's perceptions and behaviours towards their space and place.
Robyn Williams: So, could those habits he's studying be useful or a disadvantage? A tricky problem in the battlefield. PhD student Seimeng Lai at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra.
And so back to Mark Dodgson and a few points from his talk today.
Mark, if we do go back to the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago, it's said that it didn't come only from the scientists and engineers but from the tradies as well. How true is that suggestion?
Mark Dodgson: Very true. There weren't the boundaries between disciplines that we see today. People were intellectually curious about everything. Those great people who belonged to the famous Lunar Society, great thinkers like Watt and Matthew Boulton and Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, the person who discovered oxygen, used to meet monthly and talk about everything. They'd share poems, they'd share fossils, they'd talk about political events, they'd talk about engineering and scientific advances. They were concerned about everything. There weren't the demarcations that we see nowadays between disciplines and fields of study, and the world was so much richer as a result.
Robyn Williams: But there were also the skills that came from people making cannons and boilers, and so you had not just the invention of the locomotive in one go, but they already had half of it there which they could adapt.
Mark Dodgson: They were certainly very good at leveraging and using existing material and instruments and machinery, but they were also learning. This stuff hadn't been done before, they were right at the forefront, and so they were experimentalists. They realised that knowledge was available in all the things that they could do, and they were very expert at transferring that knowledge from field to field. They respected the knowledge that was necessary to make things. They got their hands dirty. Nowadays very few people in science or business have that capacity. They don't know how things are made, they don't get their hands dirty.
Robyn Williams: One of the most astounding things about what you were saying about early Australia was that genius Henry Sutton who you put up there with the absolute top of the A-team. How come in a year, which was 2012 which was the centenary of his death, nobody knew who he was, he wasn't mentioned?
Mark Dodgson: It's a great anomaly, and I suspect the major reason is that he was working in such isolation. There wasn't a nearby university with colleagues for him to work with who could record his inventions, publish his works. He was a lonely individual working miles from anywhere really.
Robyn Williams: But he was there in the mining industry, Ballarat being a centre of mining.
Mark Dodgson: Yes, and he of course did things in the Ballarat School of Mines where he worked, such as introduce a telephone system, remarkably. But I suspect that if he were in the UK, for example during the period of the Industrial Revolution where he had all his counterparts who were similarly talented and similarly adventurous in their thinking, there would have been more opportunity firstly for his ideas to become visible, but also to be more adequately recorded. We just don't have the records of his achievements. So it really is a question of his isolation I think.
Robyn Williams: You also mentioned the fact that…we've mentioned mining but it was also agriculture was this kind of melting pot for bright ideas and innovation going on all the time. In some ways a mixed blessing, you know, Donald Horne's 'lucky country', said with some irony. Was it a mixed blessing?
Mark Dodgson: Well, if you look at other countries that began their industrialisation with mining and agriculture, such as Britain, what they did was they managed to build around those industries a whole range of engineering and manufacturing concerns. So they built the machinery that operated the coal mines, they built the agricultural equipment that tilled the soil and processed the food. We never did that. We haven't developed those support industries in the way that other industrialising countries have. Maybe it's because we are so blessed and so lucky to have such resources that we never felt it necessary to be able to develop it, and we developed the mentality that these kind of technologies and industries could be bought from overseas. So I suspect it might be the myopia that we have unfortunately inherited as a result of our extraordinarily good luck to be surrounded by such resources.
Robyn Williams: Now, if we leap ahead, next week we're going to be talking about mainly the 20th century, but if we can leap ahead even further, which do you think are at the moment the most transformative technologies we have right now that will make everything completely different in future?
Mark Dodgson: This might surprise you but I actually think one of the most transformative technologies of all time is probably in your pocket now, as it's in mine, it's the mobile phone, the smart phone, the smart phone that has transformed our lives in such a very short period of time. This morning I did my banking on my mobile phone, I never go to a bank branch anymore, I checked in on the airline using my mobile phone, I didn't have to print out a boarding card, I had a three-way conversation with people in the United States and the UK for nothing, it cost me nothing. Now, that's a transformation.
But it's going to be more transformational I believe for developing economies and the poor of the world because we have at the moment nearly 100% coverage in the world of mobile phones. There are seven-odd billion people and over six billion mobile phones. Developing economies like Brazil have over 100% people have a mobile phone, so there are more phones than people.
And one of the biggest problems in the past for people in developing economies has been access to capital, access to small amounts of money, which is why the micro-financing has been so successful in many regards, but that has been a problem because of distribution. Once you get micro-financing on your mobile phone so you can save, make and receive transactions, you open up a whole new opportunity for people to belong to the global economy. You see examples in Kenya with their telecom system M-Pesa, for example, which is now pretty much ubiquitous throughout Kenya, where poor impoverished farmers are getting information about weather conditions and seed prices and the prices of their grain and the products that they produce. They are being able to access small amounts of money for investment, massive amounts of innovation is being produced.
Now, the infrastructure behind the mobile phone is enormous of course and it depends on the large multinational companies because they have got the scale to be able to produce that infrastructure. But what it does is it liberates the capacity of everybody, small people, you in me, small groups, villages, small communities, to develop small applications that solve their local problems.
We had a digital divide before. The internet allowed, in principle, everybody access to this world of information, but you needed a $1,000 computer, you needed an internet service provider, and you needed storage. But now you have a very cheap mobile phone, nowadays they can be sold for $20, $30, you have cloud computing, and services are provided very, very cheaply, so everybody has access to the internet. The digital divide is no more.
Robyn Williams: And to think that it began in the 1880s with Henry Sutton and his friends in Ballarat. Quite amazing!
Mark Dodgson: Who'd have thought it!
Robyn Williams: A final question really looking to the future in the 20th century or some of the problems that began in the 20th century for us as we're dealing with them now, and that is the lack of skills and the functional illiteracy, because I keep coming across the figure that something like four million people in the working population are functionally illiterate. How can we leap forward and innovate with situations like that?
Mark Dodgson: It is terrifying, totally terrifying, and if you look at the amount of effort going in to education in countries like China and India, and of course in countries like Korea and Taiwan, there's massive concern to educate people, improve their literacy. The contrast with what we seem to do here with our really quite careless approach to education across all levels is quite startling.
I have a very simple analogy about the training that we'll require in the future. Our educational system in the past has produced people that are I-shaped, they're long and thin. We develop a great deal of expertise and depth in one particular area. But we need people now who are T-shaped, that have that depth in particular areas of expertise but they also understand how things fit together, they can work across disciplines and across boundaries and think about how their knowledge relates to other areas of knowledge. So we need to produce T-shaped people. And that is a massive challenge in our schooling system and our universities which move towards more and more specialisation all the time. So I think that is going to be one of the tests in the future, is how we generalise people's knowledge and understanding about the world at the same time as developing their specific expertise that can deliver particular skills of relevance to their profession.
Robyn Williams: Mark Dodgson from the Business School at the University of Queensland, and Professor Dodgson returns next week with program two in this Science Show series. Production by David Fisher and Leila Shunnar. I'm Robyn Williams.
- Mark Dodgson
- Professor and Director
Technology and Innovation Management Centre
Business School
University of Queensland
Further Information
- Presenter
- Robyn Williams
- Producer
- David Fisher
Comments (16)
Marcus :
26 Jan 2013 12:53:13pm
This presentation reverts to the past of industry burning away, destroying nature and our connection to it, exploding population supported by mass production, and leaving us as lazy automatons cycling in a constructed rat race. Innovation is required into understanding the formation of thoughts, feelings, and human and other living functions within environments - not distanced from them by industry. I have written about this exact issue in a free book (980 kb pdf) in 'the cloud' at at http://sdrv.ms/10UzytW
The individual needs to know how and why s/he functions, beyond 'getting up to work at the office / factory to make some dough to pay bills and enjoy the footy on Saturday and dinner with the folks on Sunday'. The presenter can take an economic view of units swayed by innovation to alter their natural behavior, but I don't, as we are still looking to define what that natural behavior might be, and how it might bring happiness to the individual.
It all revolves around individuals and their state of knowledge about themselves and the world, for a rational and satisfying worldview in which they have all the connections to nature that might bring happiness. Science needs to be geared towards the individual, and not industry swaying the individual. I don't mind admitting I don't drive, don't use washers, do have a veggie patch, and do preprare all my own food. I am not a peasant, or deprived. I'm 53 and I time trial 4 kilometers in under 15 minutes.
Good luck to the dinosaur view of using nature to burn to support laziness of mind and body, as quite the opposite is required. At some point it will all need to wind down and adjust by individuals steering their own lives, informed by valuable science returning to humans and away from industry. Work on yourself and respect nature as it should be respected. The ABC takes a middle ground in all of this, as they probably should, but their main problem is that these shows are mouthpieces for institutions without any independent analysis or proper criticism. Lazy and fawning.
Mark Dodgson :
29 Jan 2013 8:01:32am
Thank you for this comment. As I mentioned early in my talk, my approach will not please everyone, and some will decry the positive attitudes to innovation.
I believe innovation has improved our lives immeasurably and the medium for delivering those improvements is business. It is business that organizes the effort and takes the risk behind the innovations we enjoy in healthcare, transport, food, communications etc. One of the biggest challenges confronting business is how to use its expertise and initiative to tackle environmental sustainability.
Matthew :
02 Feb 2013 6:05:43pm
Ha! An aging hippie with a running habit.
It would be engaging to hear how the science that you'd like the world refocus upon the individual were to be supported. Do you advocate that scientists tend their veggies before jogging to work? The rat race that you are so scathing about is fostering the very science that you would like to refocus. Maybe scientists should barter their cobs of corn for a Large Hadron Collider? Perhaps you bartered corn for the computer you used to leave your post? A conundrum.
You touch on the issues of overpopulation and living sustainably. These are very serious issues which I understand better than many, and which I do not trivialise. But the time for disbanding the cities to small commune farms has been and gone. We are already far too many, and our problems require far more resources than can be garnered from cobs of corn alone. You are several generations too late for this thinking. You need to adapt to the new reality. We now have to cope with crazy populations as best we can, using whatever means are necessary. Or do you advocate a widespread culling of the human race?
Dinosaur thinking indeed.
Marcus :
03 Feb 2013 11:39:57am
Not an ageing hippie with a running habit. That summary portends a ridiculous reply, but I will read on, as it's not so easy to dismiss the importance of shifting away from industry and towards humanity. Humanity is not served by industry, it is isolated from nature by industry, physically and psychologically. Have a read of my ideas more specifically in my free book at my site thehumandesign.net or in the cloud at http://sdrv.ms/Uvw7G0
I see you like black and white analyses, and its good to read your post to expose some fallacies. Obviously I use a computer for communication, a very useful tool, but I don't support the shocking waste of consumerism and heavy industry. I particularly abhor the miltary sway. Happiness will need other drivers, more directly connected to nature.
It's a sick idea indeed, the widespread culling of the human race. I would advocate a reduction in child bearing, certainly. This sort of dinosaur black & white reactivity to an important point, which is also missed by the speaker himself in his reply, show what needs to be overcome if we are to progress.
In fact, I would advocate winding down industry, increasing innovation in human awareness, and the connection between environment and individual in the formation of thoughts & fellings, rather than heavy industry and consumerism. Being satisfied with far less, and staying as fit & healthy as possible would be the general idea. Far less waste, far more discipline, far more personal & environmental knowledge would be the direction. Everyone should be an Amateur Scientist.
The point is that the speaker is heavily swayed to products and growth by the dinosaur approach of industry and consumerism. It needs correcting, which I have done, and which is not assisted by ridiculously reactive replies, or evasive ones.
Rodney Wetherell :
26 Jan 2013 12:53:55pm
Thank you for this excellent talk on innovation in Australia - and the relative lack of it at present, when compared to the past. I was fascinated to hear about Henry Sutton of Ballarat, possibly one of the world's great inventors, says Mark Dodgson. We imagine that the spate of high-tech innovations, from IPads to smart phones, make our time highly innovative, but really, many of these are just variations on a theme. People like Sutton no doubt made more significant inventions - and have been forgotten.
Nick Sharp :
26 Jan 2013 1:12:33pm
Thank you. Exceptionally fine and riveting programme. I shall be listening again to the download and looking forward to parts #2 and #3.
I hope enough of the right pollies listen.
Antony C.P. Clarke :
26 Jan 2013 1:30:23pm
A fascinating and fairly wide ranging talk spoiled by factual error. Edison only "invented" the incandescent filament light a mere six months after he had read Swans description of how he had actually done it. Swan and Edison sued each other for some time until they established the Ediswan company. Edison's great invention was the Development Laboratory where he employed people to invent things that he could patent.
Mark Dodgson :
29 Jan 2013 7:53:59am
Thank you for you comments. 'Edison' is frequently used as a collective noun for the work that went on in his laboratories in Menlo Park and latterly West Orange. As I mentioned in the program, Edison 'developed' the light bulb, I did not say he invented it. His was the only large scale manufacturing enterprise capable of making them. I agree that his major contribution was a form of industrial research organisation, a point I made in my Ockham's Razor on the subject, and in my book "Innovation: A Very Short Introduction", Oxford University Press, 2011.
ed bernacki :
11 Feb 2013 2:18:10pm
Perhaps a future edition of the show could explore what Edison did in exact terms. As far as I knew, he bought the Patent for the light bulb from two Canadian inventors.....I have this from another source.
In 1875, Edison purchased half of a Toronto medical electrician's patent to further his own research. That researcher was named James Woodward.
Woodward and a colleague by the name of Matthew Evans, described in the patent as a "Gentleman" but in reality a hotel keeper, filed a patent for the Woodward and Evan's Light on July 24, 1874.
Working at the Morrison's Brass Foundry on Adelaide St. West in Toronto, they built the first lamp with a shaped rod of carbon held between electrodes in an glass bulb filled with nitrogen.
Woodward and Evans were treated as cranks and subject to much public ridicule. "Who needs a glowing piece of metal!!" They attempted, with very little success, to form a company to raise money to refine and market their invention.
In 1876, Woodward obtained a U.S. patent on his electric lamp and, in 1879, Edison considered it sufficiently important to completely buy out the patent from Woodward, Evans, and all their Canadian partners. Woodward sold a share of his Canadian patent to Thomas Edison in 1885.
Thus the electric light bulb became American.
There was an issue with the US patent as it was very close to what Swan had conceived in the 1860s in the UK.
In 1880, Swan and Edison teamed up to produce the first "practical" light bulb.
Bronwyn Wright :
26 Jan 2013 10:08:06pm
Thankyou for addressing innovation in Australia. From the viewpoint of 100 years after his death, it is sad that Henry rarely patented his work. Henry Sutton was my grandmother's uncle. The Suttons were a very creative, musical family & the innovator gene has been passed down in many family members.
It is not generally known that the painter Hilda Rix Nicholas was Henry Sutton's niece. There will be a major exhibition of Hilda's paintings at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra this year 1st June to end of August for the Canberra Centenary year.
Here is a bit of info from the Canberra 100 site
There have been several books published on Hilda Rix Nicholas' work - two in the last three months: Hilda Rix Nicholas: Her Art & Life 2000 by John Pigot; In Search of Beauty 2012 by Karen Johnson; Hilda Rix Nicholas & Elsie Rix's Moroccan Idyll 2012.
(Hilda's mother, Elizabeth Sutton was Henry's elder sister.) I hope that one day, someone will make a documentary about Henry Sutton.
valerie yule :
27 Jan 2013 7:14:54pm
Australians tend to be very innovative, tinkering round with gadgets, but as a nation, we do very little to let the ideas get past our own homes, or our own brains.
Our family was one of continual tinkering and gadgetry, and even patents, but all that got further were
1. H V McKay and his Sunshine Harvester
2. My uncle invented a small screw which kept dirt out of the cream in the separator, and made more from that than from his dairy farm.
Yet if the ways of doing things which were invented had been taken up further, we would have a rather different life-style today.
All those Men's Sheds, which are not made the most of . .
When I was an Innovations Counsellor in schools under Whitlam's Disadvantaged Schools Program, almost all teachers' innovations were ways to spend the money, without thought of future years. The government money counted for most - as if does today.
Michael Swan :
28 Jan 2013 5:43:53pm
The functional illiteracy of most Australians, especially engineers, scientists, and other professionals who should know better, is astounding.
I am not surprised though given mainstream media's monotonously gross overuse and misrepresentation of the word 'technology' and its real meaning.
Nowadays, the term 'technology' is most often misused contextually by marketing departments (and patent holders) who give the impression their new products somehow benefit from a fundamentally nonexistent technology.
Some common examples are; shoe sole technology, hyper-perlised particle technology for facial makeup, i-Gadgets, and Bluetooth technology for cars.
When technology is mentioned today nine times out of ten the issue under discussion is electronics and the application thereof.
Hmmm, the 'technology' of marketing?
paul hill :
28 Jan 2013 7:41:00pm
I am by trade an electronic technician. However, when I did my trade at AWA, starting 1956, I spent time in the press shop, drill shop, turret and center lathes, milling machines, shapers, sheet metal, etc. Later on I got a job doing sheet metal work where I learned gas and arc welding as well as spray painting. All this time I worked on cars, motor bikes, various machines and later still taught myself landscape gardening & concrete moulding. In short there is not much I haven't had a go at and am extremely fastidious.
Then in 1967 I became an abalone diver and now had the income to build a number of workshops in my home starting 1975. I've always been a bit of an inventor, so now this penchant could flourish. I began constructing an oxy hydrogen energy system, a water system, a modular concrete molding system, a range of biofeedback equipment etc. 16 years work up till all hours.
Then I began to get into financial difficulties due to changes in the taxation system introduced by the Fraser Government which were anathema to small business, the inventor especially, ie abolition of double depreciation and the 40% investment allowance on plant. All this rather than introduce a capital gains tax to reign in all the greenmailing, takeovers, round robins, bottom of the harbour schemes. There was innovation in theft that's for sure.
When the Hawke govt. came to power it introduced sales tax on small tools, the last straw, the last nail in the inventors coffin. In desperation I set up a print room and began printing plans of my inventions in the form of little booklets which I sent to various media outlets and in town folks letterboxes. I also tried to get a 125% R&D tax allowance. I got nowhere.
In 1987 my house was raided by the trustee and the entire contents of my print room and my electronics workshop was seized as well as the head of the enlarger in my darkroom. I was evicted from my house but I broke back in once the trustee and police had left. As taxation is a commonwealth matter the local cops were powerless to stop me.
Finally on the Thursday before Easter 1988 I was arrested by commonwealth cops and put into Pentridge prison. Then on Easter Saturday April 1st (get that) Australia shot itself in both feet and in the head. Hundreds of people turned up for my bankruptcy auction, and 16 years work was ripped apart. Nobody tried to stop this act of complete lunacy, indeed close 'friends' turned up to participate in my pack raping.
Now comes the punch line. My precious tools of trade, my means of invention were auctioned off illegally. A bankruptee at that time was entitled to keep tools of trade to the value of $2,500 and a car to the same value. My car was also sold. I've no doubt that the intention of not just the trustee was to drive me to suicide as I was exposing many illegalities committed by his firm, hence the previous raid on my print room.
Dalma :
03 Feb 2013 11:42:36am
I find this article both timely, purposeful and elucidating !
My, haven't we a few knockers in this column. Trouble is, as I see it, over five decades we are still applauding our very primitive, stone age, so called proverbial aussie inventions e.g. the clothes hoist, victor mower, wirraway fighter, flush toilet, to name a few. So immersed are we with our introverted skewed entrepreneurship, we went to great length to show the World our intelligence at the Olympics in Melbourne, with gorgeous miss Buckley hanging from the roof ? The London Olympics copied the idea. Who's next ! Rio de Janerio. Brazil ?
We now live in the most extraordinary,exciting age of the century, with Ipads, WiFi,7/8 ft Plasma screens, NBN, robotics, internet, satellite drones, space travel etc but it isn't happening here. We don't have a Silicon Valley, much less the innovative spirit that propels these spirited inventions !
We have an Academia which prides it's self with delivering the goods, yet most of our graduates migrate Overseas to broaden their Education, evade the obnoxious HEC debt, or work in other fields, which is unaustralian, selfish, lopsided and repeated yearly enmasse.
Our ADF is a prime example of relying on the good graces of Uncle Sam, for their know-how, hardware, software, and even uniforms, which are imported. It encourages Technologist to look askance, and piggyback on developments from abroad. The exercise in adaption is counter productive, and in the long term, we become so subservient, and beholden to a Foreign Power, we are indebted for Life for what little that we finally receive in Fighter Aircraft, submarines, amphibious ships etc ? And, what about constant updates, spares, and wear & tear ? Unsustainable.
Finally, encapsulated, we spend less on Research & Development, over this generation, then we do on mental Health ! The way we treat dementia, depression, and myriad psychotic disorders, PTSD etc, is a crying shame. Reminiscent of third World standards. Out of sight, is out of mind.
Our Politicians, should be held accountable for the largest faux pas perpetuated, since WWII on a gullible, but trusting Nation !
She'll be right Jake. Trust me.
Charles :
07 Feb 2013 6:26:51am
I like all the podcasts, but this was a real standout for me as it resonated with a recent experience I myslef had, that is the path from invention to innovation is a tough ride.
I myself along with a colleague through the University of Newcastle have launched a patent for an antibody treatment of leukemia. The data is solid, but still in its infancy. We have gone down the medical commericialisation fund path and others, all to be told "great idea, but you have no track record in commercialisation, and you need more data". Problem is, we need capital and grant funding to get the data. It would have been great to have had advice on how to make the grant a success, perhaps even go so far to send people our way. At the end of the day 100% ownership of nothing still is nothing. But a small % of alot will be a lot. We keep chipping away, and I have now moved to europe to on another post-doc position tying to get more data for our patent with a view to commercialisation, but nothing we could not have done in Australia if we had the funding!
Eleanor Purcell :
06 Nov 2013 7:25:06pm
I was most amused to hear the BCA speaker commenting on the importance of collaboration. My experience in large organisations over the past 25 years is that collaboration is most effective when there is a diversity of approaches, personalities and perspectives participating. One of the biggest challenges businesses (particularly large businesses) face is group think. I cannot think of a time in my working life when group think was so entrenched or as big an issue as it is at present - no different to why there are so few senior females. No mavericks here - no head above the trenches . The only conclusion to be drawn is it is this way because many businesses intend it to be. I look back fondly on the days when the mavericks oddballs and politically incorrect were also accommodated . I completely agree with Steve Jobs:
''Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers,'' - This is where you often find innovation - not in group think.


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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (Playaway Adult Nonfiction Ser.)
- Synopsis
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A New York Times Bestseller
- Copyright:
- 2011
Book Details
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- 832 Pages
- 9781101544648
- Related ISBNs:
- 9780670022953
- Publisher:
- Penguin Group US
- Date of Addition:
- 03/23/18
- Copyrighted By:
- Steven Pinker, 2
- Adult content:
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- Language:
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- Has Image Descriptions:
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- Categories:
- Nonfiction, Science, Psychology, Philosophy, Sociology
- Grade Levels:
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- Submitted By:
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High Elf Chapter 11 PQ
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location: Grimwater, Avelorn, Chapter 11
Other PQs & BOs in this chapter:
PQ Lore: A mass of Harpies under the control of a Beastmaster have made their roost in this clearing of Avelorn. The vicious creatures have ransacked the countryside, slaying and feasting upon anything they can kill. The longer these creatures remain in the forest, the more they ruin the serene silence of Avelorn with their vile shrieking, and curse its enduring beauty with a blight of slaughtered corpses. They must be destroyed.
Stage 1: Bonebreaker Harpy
Stage 2: Beastmaster Kohdred
Stage 3: Maligia Eyegouger
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Secret Garden Tour
Sat, 06/27/2015 to Sun, 06/28/2015 Primary tabs View(active tab)Repeats + Add to Itinerary null Location: Glen Miller Park 2200 E Main St. Richmond , IN 47374 http://visitrichmond.org/visitors/events-festivals/secret-garden-tour Phone # to call for information: (765) 966-0256 This annual event gives you the opportunity to visit the canvasses of local landscape artists throughout our community. The Rose Garden at Glen Miller Park will be featured again this year, which is where the garden boutique featuring unique iron works, baskets, containers and a variety of garden accessories will be held. The Richmond Group plein air painters will be on the grounds painting! Many of the paintings will be available for purchase. Planting demonstrations will be offered at the boutique. All the gardens are norht of US 40, primarily in the Quaker Hill, Spring Grove area of Richmond. Tickets will be available at the Richmond Art Museum and will be available at the RAM during the garden tour. All proceeds benefit operations at the Richmond Art Museum. Saturday: 9:00am to 3:00pm, Sunday: 10:00am to 3:00pm (Rain or shine) Tickets $10 each advance sale or $12 on the days of the tour. Available at RAM and all First Bank Richmond locations.


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Kenya's NASA Opposition Hold Demos Against Electoral Body Officials
Supporters of Kenya's opposition coalition, NASA on Tuesday flocked the capital, Nairobi and its strongholds, to demand for resignation of electoral body officials, ahead of the 26 October fresh presidential elections.
NASA supporters were demanding resignation of Ezra Chiloba, the C.E.O of the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), and other 10 including the suspended Head of ICT James Muhati.
They are accused by the opposition of being behind the "irregularities and illegalities" of the annulled August 8 elections.
NASA's flag bearer, Raila Odinga, last week, released names of 12 individuals to be replaced if elections are to be held.
The demonstrations are also in defiance of IEBC's request on Monday, to cancel them as the body has arranged a consultative meeting on Wednesday to fix the issues.
President Uhuru's jubilee party has condemned the opposition's claims, urging them to allow IEBC to its work to prepare for the 26 October elections.


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I'm not that much into politics, really, as it's a subject that has, for almost 18 years, failed to interest me. But today, on a whim, I was doing a bit of research on Pauline Hanson, who, as any Australian will know, is making what might be called a comeback. Please explain.
In her maiden speech when she was elected in 1996 Hanson said, among other questionable things, that "we are in danger of being swamped by Asians. They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate." Form ghettos. Swamped by Asians. What was she thinking?
Now, this may come across quite contradictory, but I've always been something of a Hanson admirer. Not because I'm a closet racist but because the lady had balls. Yes, she was a xenophobe, yes, she did miss the lesson on political correctness, and, yes, she's a nutbag, but she was saying what a lot of Australians believed (and many still do) at the time.
She reminds me a bit of Germaine Greer, actually. They're both women I respect, albeit fear and question the sanity of. They were both a bit radical, both controversial, but what makes them different to all the other lunatics we've got wandering around Australia is that they were influential. Indeed, wikipedia tells me that in 2006, The Bulletin named Hanson one of the 100 most influential Australians. I mean, if that's not something to be proud of I'm not sure what is.
Greer too made her mark through controversy. The Female Eunuch was flying off shelves in the 70s (or so I'm told- that was about 20 years before I was born), and that book pissed a LOT of people off. Looking at Hanson, it's easy to draw comparisons- feminism was a crack-pot idea back in the day but it changed the world. Who's to say Pauline's views and continued popularity amongst a very small public wont, one day, change the way we think. On the other hand, racism is a thing of the past. A lot of people might argue that Hanson's views are archaic, as well as illogical.
The whole point of this post wasn't to express my support or disdain for Pauline or Germaine, or even to make a point at all. In fact, in all honesty, it was to examine what life might become like for me over the years- reporters aren't very popular people, and, as a Uni student studying the very art of Journalism, looking at what a life of controversy and being the underdog has done to these women and their reputations, I'm not really sure if I could handle it.
March 7, 2009
Pauline Hanson
I'm not that much into politics, really, as it's a subject that has, for almost 18 years, failed to interest me. But today, on a whim, I was doing a bit of research on Pauline Hanson, who, as any Australian will know, is making what might be called a comeback. Please explain.
8 Comments »
I'm back!!! Sorry about everyone's luck.
Comment by The Bastard — October 23, 2009 @ 6.38p10
At Sandra:
"I'd never add here as a friend to any of my Facebook accounts because of her hypocrisy."
Comment by Anonymous — July 23, 2010 @ 6.38p07
I just found this!
It's my old blog, I haven't thought about it in years.
I'd get back on if I knew the password. God I used to rant!
Comment by Happychick — November 30, 2010 @ 6.38p11
No argument there.
Comment by Anonymous — February 26, 2014 @ 6.38p02
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI


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Letter of Credit, L/C, DLC —
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Twitterrific is an app that is near and dear to my heart, as I have been using since day one of being on Twitter (nearly 7 years!). Over the years I have developed a wonderful friendship with some of the folks at The Iconfactory. As such, I've been a beta tester for a good long while, and the 5.9 update has been particularly difficult to keep quiet as I've just wanted to scream about its awesomeness from the mountains.
Yeah yeah, there aren't mountains in the Great Plains, so maybe just a small hill. I digress.
I love photos. Twitterrific 5.9 is all about photos. You can now add mutliple photos (up to 4) using Twitter's photo service, and you can view photos (even multiple photos) from just about any service you can link to. Best of all, Instagram photos now load in Twitterrific's photo viewer without having to load the mobile site.
Videos also get a nice treatment with an improved viewer with playback controls, as well as animated GIFs. My colleagues at work and I basically live off GIFs, so this is extremely welcome.
Twitterrific 5.9 is a free update in the App Store, and it really is the most delightful Twitter app out there. If you love simplicity without sacrificing features, you need to get acquainted with Twitterrific.
Be sure to check out The Iconfactory's feature overview video for Twitterrific 5.9, and either leave or update a review on the App Store.


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"The Commission will moreover continue to fully support the European Firearms Experts Group's activities to develop a handbook for tracking and tracing illegal firearms. Building upon the International Tracing Instrument and the international best practices developed by the United Nations International Small Arms Control Standards (ISACS), this manual will be disseminated to all Member States' law enforcement authorities. Tracing guidance and rules could include a requirement to generate reports to Europol to facilitate international tracing requests."
READ FULL REPORT — Implementing the European Agenda on Security: EU action plan against illicit trafficking in and use of firearms and explosives


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Mortgage Companies in Framingham, MA
Comprehensive list of Framingham, Massachusetts based commercial and home mortgage brokers and lenders.
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Located in Wellesley, MA we originate all kinds of loans and provide expert service before, during, and after the loan process. By using Mortgage Resources, you will be receiving the benefit of national lender rates and local service. If you are searching for a domestic loan in the state of Massachusetts, you have come to the best place.
Great Point Mortgage was created to help you with your home mortgage requirements. Whether you are a 1st time homebuyer purchasing a new home, refinancing your current mortgage, or buying your dream vacation home, we know that all borrowers are not the same, and have different credit, financial and employment backgrounds.
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Free And Scary Halloween 2018 Music For Kids
Free And Scary Halloween Music For Kids -: Hello guys and girls, friends and my all reader, first of all, I want to wish all of you happy Halloween day 2018 as you all know that Halloween day is coming very fast towards us and we are going to celebrate it with some different ideas. Today we are giving you free and scary Halloween music for kids to listen and enjoy with friends in the Halloween party.
You can check :- Halloween 2018 Costumes Ideas
Must See Once -: Simple, Last Minutes And Easy Halloween Costumes Ideas For Kids
You can see some here too -: Cute Little Teenage Girls Halloween Costumes Ideas For 2018
As the day comes nearer, I normally listen Halloween day wishes, Halloween costume ideas, Halloween makeup, Halloween songs but seen many people who don't able to found all these stuff so now today we are giving you some ideas of free and scary Halloween music for kids. Today you can able to hear all these free and scary Halloween music and songs for kids for free download and listen with your friends and family at any time in the day of Halloween. Lots of people like to listen to such songs which is normally based on the theme of the Halloween day so we bring some songs of that scary nature too which you can hear in your free time.
We are coming back to our topic of free and scary Halloween music for kids which are shortlisted by me as follows. Take a look.
Halloween Songs for Children
Scary Halloween Music For Kids


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Helvetia, WV
Helvetia Highlights for April 2010
Saturday, April 3. First Saturday Square Dance. Adults $5. Age 12 and under, $2. 8:00 p.m. Community Hall.
Monday, April 5. Farm Women's Club Meeting. 6:30 p.m.
Tuesday, April 13. Monthly meeting of the Helvetia Restoration and Development Organization. 6 p.m. at the Helvetia Public Library.
Tuesday, April 13.Comprehensive Educational Facilities Plan Community Forum Meeting. The meeting will provide input to the planners on school needs and the input will be used to prioritize projects for recommended funding. The meeting is open to all members of the community, so please participate and encourage others as well. Tygarts Valley High School at 6:30 p.m.
Saturday, April 17. Pickens Ramp Supper. 2:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. American Legion Hall. Ramps, ham, cornbread, beans, fried potatoes, applesauce, cole slaw, and dessert. Sponsored by Pickens Post 122 American Legion. $10 for adults, $5 for children under 12. 304-924-5813.
Monday, April 19. Helvetia Public Library Board of Trustees meeting. At the Library. 5:00 p.m.
Saturday, April 24. Helvetia Ramp Supper. 3:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. or when all food is gone. Community Hall. Fried and fresh ramps, beans, ham, fried potatoes, coleslaw, applesauce, cornbread, drink, and dessert. Volunteers will be preparing over 80 bushels of ramps, 300 pounds of ham, 60 pounds of beans, 480 pounds of potatoes, and 200 pounds of cabbage. $14 adults, $7 children. Dance with music by the Helvetia Star Band from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. $5. Sponsored by the Farm Women and the Community Hall Association.


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Thailand Maps
Bangkok Map
Baiyoke Sky Hotel
Last minute booking
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Discount 30%
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try again.
not as well known for shopping as Hong Kong or
Singapore, Bangkok is actually a great shopping
city, with everything from international retailers
offering haute couture to street vendors selling
"antique" opium pipes and phony Rolex
watches (that may be confiscated -- with no
compensation -- by customs agents). Bangkok's most
popular exports are its lovely silks and silk
products, jewelry, celadon pottery, lacquerware,
masks, carvings and antiques. If a price seems too
steep, chances are you can talk it down. The
language barrier isn't a problem: Every street
vendor carries a calculator, and without a word
spoken, the calculator passes hands sometimes six
or seven times before a settlement is reached.
Treasure hunters won't want to miss the Weekend
Market at Chatuchak Park, on the north end of the
city. Silom Road, near Patpong Road, is a hive of
activity every night.
find an especially large concentration of shops up
and down Silom and Suriwong Roads. Small shops
abound in Chinatown, north of the Grand Palace.
Note: Be very cautious when buying
antiques. Thais are not only famous for their
excellent fakes, but government regulations are
very strict concerning the exportation of genuine
antiques, especially religious items (the export
of Buddha images, old or new, is forbidden). If
you do find something you like and it is
authentic, be prepared for a mountain of
paperwork. Before you can take the item out of the
country, you'll need approval from the Fine Arts
Department, which can take up to a month to
obtain. Some reputable shops provide this service.
The government agency called The Fine Arts
Department is on Na-Pharathat Road, phone
Antiques, near the river, sells quality
antique furniture, religious artifacts,
bric-a-brac and reproductions. They're always
willing to discuss the price. Monday-Saturday 9
am-6 pm. 148/9 Surawong Rd., phone 235-8981.
Asian Treasures is a delightful shop
where snarling lions, serene Buddhas and erotic
ladies peek out of every corner. Four floors of
antiques, semi-antiques and reproductions.
Balinese wood carvings, Burmese wall hangings,
Ceylon masks, Indian and Nepalese jewelry, plus
quirky things from local artists. 137/6-7
Sukhumvit Rd., between Soi 9 and 11, phone
253-7693 or 251-6867, fax 253-5792.
the River City shopping
complex, many of the shops on the upper
floors specialize in antiques and bronzeware. It's
on the riverside, between the GPO and the Royal
Orchid Sheraton, on Yotha Road. Phone 237-0077.
of the finer art galleries are located in upscale
malls, big hotels (where exhibits come and go) and
foreign embassies. Check the daily
English-language newspapers, The Bangkok Post and
The Nation, as well as Metro Magazine, for current
Collectors' House can usually be
counted on for paintings of good taste and
accomplishment. Monday-Saturday 10 am-7 pm and by
appointment. 919/1 Sukhumvit Rd. (between Soi 49
and Soi 51), phone 259-1436.
Cafe & About Studio concentrates on
photography -- the only gallery to do so.
Exhibitors are Thai and resident foreigners. On
occasion, this is a setting for performance art
and alternative bands. Monday-Friday 9 am-6 pm and
by appointment. The cafe is open later and on
weekends. 402-B Matreejit Rd., Pomrap (near
Hualampong Railway Station), phone 623-1742 or
Diem Galleries mainly showcase foreign
artists -- Western, Asian and Westerners who are
working in Asia. Daily 10 am-5 pm. 806/1-2
Sukhumvit (Soi Thonglor), phone 714-9903.
Pung Art Community provides space for
the most fringey, dissident artists --
installations, performance art, sculpture,
whatever. Not members of the academy. Sometimes
there's alternative music. Saturday and Sunday
only, 11 am-6 pm. Opposite Section 13 in the
Weekend Market, Chatuchak Park, phone 513-7225.
Department Store, an outlet of the
Japanese chain, is near the Erawan Shrine, Amarin
Plaza and the Ratchadamri Road intersection.
McDonald's at ground level. Brimful of quality
goods and apparel. Pleasant restaurant, too. Daily
10 am-8 pm. 494 Ploenchit Rd., phone 255-0831.
Department Store, near the end of Silom
Road, past Patpong, combines a supermarket (with
garden-fresh vegetables), a restaurant and an
extensive dry-goods area. It's a popular local
hangout as well. Daily 10 am-10 pm. 2 Silom Rd.,
phone 235-0471.
Phand isn't quite a department store,
but it's large, government run and sells every
type of traditional handicraft, from nielloware to
basketry. Daily 10 am-8 pm. 127 Ratchadamri Rd.,
across from the World Trade Center, phone
Department Store is a popular shopping
center in the heart of the Silom Business
district. Good quality merchandise with good
prices. Silom Complex, 191 Silom Rd.
C is
relatively new store, found all over Thailand,
with very cheap prices.
Plaza is exclusive, with international
fashions, art galleries and jewelry. Daily 10 am-6
pm. 301 Charoenkrung 38 New Rd. (next to the
Oriental Hotel), phone 236-0411.
Phraya Tower Shopping Arcade offers
designer boutiques, leather shops, Thai silk shops
and art galleries. Daily 10 am-7 pm. 23
Rongnamkhaeng Lane (next to the Shangri-la Hotel),
phone 237-0077.
the other end of town, near the Siam
Inter-Continental and Siam Square, is Siam
Center, a huge complex filled with
restaurants, flower shops and such names as Gucci,
Lanvin and Polo. Daily 10 am-10 pm. 965 Rama I
Rd., phone 251-1890.
Boon Krong Center (MBK), also next to
Siam Square, is a window on popular culture. (Not
that you'll find much to buy, unless you're
looking for plastic shoes, polyester dresses and
counterfeit watches.) But it's very Thai and
always bustling, while the upscale malls seem to
echo. On the upper floors, dozens of shops are
dedicated to the second-most important status
symbol: the mobile phone (the first being
Mercedes). We recommend the new and used camera
shop, Fotofile, on the ground floor. Daily 10 am-9
pm. Southwest corner of Phyathai and Rama I roads,
phone 217-9111.
Square. Few will want to waste an
entire day battling traffic in order to visit this
remote, American-style mall. It's not far from the
BITEC convention center, though, and bibliophiles
will enjoy DK Books, reputedly the biggest
bookstore in Asia. Seacon Square is the only city
structure that's wheelchair accessible. 904
Srinakarin Rd., Prawet, phone 721-8888.
Plaza is the ultimate source for
electronics -- a five-story mall with shop after
shop selling computers
and electronic gear. Usually there's
nothing (except pirated software) that can't be
gotten cheaper in Hong Kong and much cheaper in
the U.S., but due to the baht devaluation,
computers and printers are temporarily at bargain
prices. But you must know precisely what you want;
salespeople know nothing about their products. No
a taxi there. Most shops open around 10 or 10:30
am; and although they're open to 8 pm, don't go
later than 3 pm unless you want to spend hours in
a traffic gridlock. New Petchburi Road between
Phyathai and Ratchaparop Roads (close to Pratuunam
Market and Amaari Watergate Hotel).
World Trade Center encompasses many
shops, restaurants and an ice-skating rink. On the
sixth floor are two movie theaters with six
screens, a vegetarian restaurant and Pam-Pam -- a
quiet Internet cafe in a fast-food shop. The
Japanese department store in this center, Isetan,
attracts few shoppers, but its supermarket bears
investigation. Daily 10 am-9 pm. 4 Rajdamri Rd.,
phone 255-9400.
Heng Bookstore is a great place to
browse: good selection of English- and
foreign-language books on Asian affairs, art,
culture and religion, as well as old maps, prints
and European and U.S. periodicals. Monday-Saturday
10 am-8:30 pm. 1326 New Rd. (between Oriental
Avenue and Silom Road, close to the Oriental,
Shangri-La and Sheraton hotels), phone 234-1836.
for English-language books at the numerous outlets
of Asia Books and
DK Books. Headquarters
shop for Asia Books is at 221 Sukhumvit Rd., phone
252-7277; outlets invariably crop up in glossier
shopping malls. Headquarters for DK Books is at
904 Moo 6, Srinakarin Road at Seacon Square, phone
393-8040. Yes, it's remote, but it's enormous and
boasts books in many languages and on many Asian
books are expensive in Thailand. If you want to
grab one or two good secondhand ones, go to Elite
Book House. They also carry lots of
English-language periodicals. Monday-Saturday 10
am-5 pm. Past Villa Supermarket, near Soi 33,
593/5 Sukhumvit Rd., phone 258-0221.
half-dozen shops and stalls on Kaosan
Road in Banglampoo are good sources for
used books, mostly paperbacks. Buy, sell or
exchange books
in English, Japanese and European languages. Open
daily roughly 10 am-9 pm.
Bangkok Hotels
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