Book review: visual insights: a practical guide to making sense of data by Katy Börner and David E. Polley

This book, developed for use in an information visualisation MOOC, covers data analysis algorithms that enable extraction of patterns and trends in data, with chapters devoted to “when” (temporal data), “where” (geospatial data), “what” (topical data), and “with whom” (networks and trees); and to systems that drive research and development. Jamie Cross finds that the book’s hands-on sections demand time and effort, and more reflection on how we exist in and relate to the world would have been welcome

Anthropology for sale

This introduction to the Anthropology for Sale special issue makes a case for renewed attention to the selling and salescraft in anthropology. Rather than presume to know in advance what kinds of ethics and interests underpin the moment of sale the contributors to this Special Issue ask how sales work allows people to perform themselves as moral actors. In this introduction we situate the moment of sale as a moment of possibility charged with play, charisma, spin and seduction, reflect on the language and rhetoric of selling, consider the presence of kinship, gender, class, caste in the marketplace, and emphasise the precariousness of selling in contexts of global economic uncertainty

Solar Basics

Stempffer Henri. Description d'une nouvelle espèce d'Harpendyreus d'Afrique orientale [Lep. Lycaenidae]. In: Bulletin de la Société entomologique de France, volume 78 (5-6), Mai-juin 1973. pp. 223-225

Essays on Economic and Policy Time Variations in Small Open Economies

This thesis consists of four research papers. The first three papers explore the prevalence and significance of time variation within the Australian economy. The final paper is distinct in that it analyzes the effects of economic and policy uncertainty on the Canadian economy. In the first paper (Chapter 2), I address recent concerns that Australian monetary policy is currently less effective than in the past. To investigate this hypothesis, I estimate a time varying structural vector autoregression (SVAR) model. The main result is that monetary policy effectiveness has increased over the sample period, with little evidence to support the claim of a weaker transmission mechanism since the 2007/08 global financial crisis. In the second paper (Chapter 3 – joint with Aubrey Poon), we build on the results in the first paper by investigating the forecasting properties of Gaussian and Student's-t distributed classes of time varying autoregressive models when predicting Australian macroeconomic variables. The main result is that time varying parameters, stochastic volatility and the Student's-t error distribution are all important modeling features of the data. More specifically, a VAR model with the proposed features provides the best inflation and interest rate forecasts over the entire sample. Surprisingly, a simple rolling window autoregressive model provides the best real GDP growth forecasts. In the third paper (Chapter 4 – joint with Aubrey Poon), we build on the results in the first two papers, by quantifying the impacts of international shocks in driving Australian business cycle fluctuations. Our methodology builds on classes of Gaussian and Student's-t distributed, time varying panel VAR models, by proposing a fat-tailed common stochastic volatility factor. We find an important asymmetry in the effects of international shocks, with around 47 percent of negative and 68 percent of positive fluctuations resulting from foreign disturbances. More generally, international shocks have contributed to around half of all Australian business cycle fluctuations over the past two decades. The fourth paper (Chapter 5 – joint with Aubrey Poon, Joshua Chan and Timothy Kam), deviates from the first three papers in that it uses Canadian data. Our objective is to quantify the impacts of uncertainty shocks to the business cycle fluctuations of a small open economy. Using a Bayesian-estimated structural model, we quantify which time-varying risk – in domestic demand or supply conditions, in domestic monetary or fiscal policy, or, in international economic and policy spillovers factors – matter for a small open economy like Canada. Our results suggest that the historical movements in Canadian real GDP are due largely to domestic fiscal- and monetary-policy shocks, and, due to non-negligible time variations in the riskiness of these policy shocks