So what, if anything, is different in Australia, using my previous home countries Finland and United States as the comparison points? The usual disclaimers about these all being incomplete, generalizations, personal non-scientific observations, YMMV etc apply. (Note that I’ve made a couple of additions to the list later on, preceded with the addition date)

Business & infrastructure

• Australian businesses are a curiously risk-averse bunch. Curiously because there’s lots of grassroots innovation and invention going on, but you wouldn’t believe it if you looked at just the enterprises. It is partly because of this that has led to a situation where many areas of technologies are, as many expats and foreigners often note, “behind” in Australia compared to other parts of the world. This is not a universal feature, however – in the area of mobiles (devices, services, even networks to some extent) and usage of social networking tools I would argue Australia is ahead of Finland, the self-proclaimed leader of mobility until some years ago. Of course, Ground Zero for mobile and social stuff is still San Francisco.

• There are lots more small businesses here than in Finland; it is evident right down to the streets, with countless lively suburbs filled with small businesses. At least in Melbourne, there are not many strip malls to speak of, but there are many, many wonderful small suburb centers with all the services provided in an almost quaint fashion, starting from the butchers to fish shops, flower shops, fruit shops etc. Not that Australia is immune to people shopping online or at supermarkets; most book stores have gone under and many smaller shops are under pressure, but at least they’re still there unlike in Finnish suburbs, let alone American suburbs. I consider these relatively distributed and localized economies to be extremely positive and important. The distributed nature applies to sectors such as health care as well, with many GPs and even specialists practicing at their home offices or at small medical centers that are dotted everywhere.

• What’s more, there are many small businesses who are completely happy being small and profitable. While many do aim for continuous growth, there is also a clear feeling that there are many small businesses who are completely content as they are – small or smallish and profitable, with no need to drive for continuous growth. I think that’s admirable.

• Many people like to make fun of Metro, or whoever happens to be the operator of the local commuter train system in Melbourne. It does have its share of problems, but overall the trains work well and so do the trams. News from Finland how VR is failing left, right and center has tempered my critique of the system here, and I would say the public transport system in Melbourne is okay. Obviously it could work better, but it’s a geographically huge city so there’s only so much one can reasonably do.

• Traffic is, in a word, polite. There is next to no speeding (speed limits are enthusiastically enforced) and driving is a remarkably smooth, low-stress experience compared to Finland. Of course there are traffic jams, but bad behavior on the roads is minimal. To exaggerate only slightly, everyone is polite, people give way at the slightest hint, be it for another car or a pedestrian. If there’s heavy rain or fog, people promptly slow down significantly. Contrast this to the Finnish drivers who seem to think it’s fine to travel at 120km/h on icy roads with visibility of 10m and it’s just baffling. Over in Boston, of course, everyone sped and you got used to it. Most of the time that worked well, too, but I suppose sticking to the speed limits does have some safety benefits.

• Housing infrastructure is a different story, however. In short, most houses are built very poorly – there is no insulation to speak of and hence houses are freezing cold in the winter; +15C as winter daytime high may not be too bad, but +15C as an indoors temperature and freezing floors as a bonus is just not right. This is a real shame since there a) is know-how to build properly, it just isn’t utilized and b) it’d be supremely easy to design passive houses given the climate. At least solar hot water heating is common and distributed solar PV generation becoming common as well.

• What houses lack in insulation, they make up for in architecture. Melbourne has some awesome architecture and I also love many of the floor plans with open kitchens and living areas.

• Some businesses, like Australia post, could use a lesson or two in logistics. Packages are always delivered home, which is a good thing because the place you pick them up from when you’re not home to receive them is a logistical nightmare. Let’s just say it’s a minor miracle we have not lost packages in either direction (yet) and that mail usually travels at reasonable speeds.

• There are many more services with home delivery than in Finland; from the numerous regular & organic food delivery companies to niche services like mobile knife sharpening services, it seems you can get pretty much any service home-delivered.

• Child care is, at least where we live, a disaster. Not only is the average quality of child care lower than in Finland, the costs are exorbitant ($100/child/day is the norm) and to top it off, waiting lists for a year or more are also normal.

People & culture

• While there is a sense of risk-aversion compared to Finland (and definitely the USA), failure does not have the stigma it still has in Finland. Much has been done in Finland in recent years to try to emphasize that failure is an inevitable part of innovation and a learning opportunity, but there is a deep-seated negative image of failure in Finland. Australia is not as failure-glorifying as the USA where failure is completely acceptable across the board, but it’s somewhere in between – and this is a recurring theme; in many, many instances Australia places somehow between Finland and the United States.

• People in Australia are very friendly and positive. This is true both superficially through positive small-talk (that I much prefer to the Finnish ways), but also on a deeper level. Having said that, however, it is probably slightly more difficult to establish deep friendships here than it is in Finland, where once you get through the veneer of brutal indifference and impoliteness, the transition into what could be called mateship here is perhaps easier. Establishing friendships with immigrants is probably easier than “native” (even non-aboriginal) Australians. This is of course a complex topic so such generalizations are somewhat dangerous.

• There is racism, but not even close to such an extent as the still sadly common xenophobia in Finland. In Finland, lots of the negative sentiment has to do with the socioeconomic and cultural background of many immigrants to Finland – substantially bigger proportion of the immigrants are refugees than here – but also because immigration is a new thing there. With 30% of Australians having been born abroad, it has been necessary to weed out outright racism or the society couldn’t function. For the most part I believe this has been successful.

• In many respects the Australian society is a more old-fashioned one than in Finland. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good, for example in the sense that people are polite and helpful; good manners are still appreciated and doors are opened for strangers. It’s also bad, for example in the sense that much of the society is structured along the same models and it’s mostly expected that women with children are at most working part time.

• Children are welcome everywhere, and they are treated with respect and friendliness – in Finland you often get the feeling that kids are somehow treated as annoyances and are often personae non gratae in places like better restaurants. Here they’re warmly welcomed and catered for.

• Grassroots environmental awareness is far more visible here than in Finland. This has been “helped” by Australia already suffering from impacts of climate change and being in general a country of climate extremes (in drought/floods etc), hence things like water conservation policies etc have had more time to be established. This environmental awareness is a bit of a paradox, considering Australia is one of the worst greenhouse gas emitters – but people still genuinely care about the environment and live close to the nature.

• The Economist report on Australian people has many good points; for example, I completely agree with these:
  

  Relative absence of conspicuous consumption (and, it has to be said, a certain lack of style in everyday dress); the evident democracy of the beach and the park; the practice of passenger and driver sitting side by side in taxis; the general amiability of discourse; the pervasiveness of a café society based, for the most part, on small enterprises producing their own excellent coffee (Australia, inventor of the “flat white”, has all but seen off Starbucks, which closed 61 out of its 85 Australian cafés three years ago, having found that anything it could do the Aussies were already doing better).

• The language, I must admit, I find occasionally annoying. Not so much the everyday spoken language – which is a mix of British and American English, spiced with heaps of local shorthand expressions and terminology – but written language, as it seems all media outlets spend 75% of their journalistic efforts to coming up with a supposedly funny wordplay-title for their articles. The more puns the better, it seems. Well I’ve got news for the MSM: 99% of it is not funny.

• [added later on Feb 7th, 2012]: jealousy and destructive envy are big issues in Finland; if someone appears to enjoy (particularly financial) success, the natural instinct of a typical Finn seems to be one of finding ways to damage this success – whereas the USA is the polar opposite of this; despite the recent 99%-vs-1% movement, success there is mostly seen as a positive & inspirational thing and something to strive for yourself, too. Australia is closer to the US in this; though there is a phenomenon called tall poppy syndrome in Australia, it’s much less prevalent than related trends in Finland.

• [added later on Feb 7th, 2012]: vandalism is less of a problem in Australia than in Finland. Helsinki is in perpetual fight against ugly graffiti tags on bus shelters, trains, buses etc. Pretty flower installations during the summer are also popular vandalism targets. I have seen very little of that here; there is clearly a better respect of the commons in Australia.

Other things

• The weather, one of the contributing reasons why we ended up moving here to begin with, is great. It is also, however, extremely variable – not quite “four seasons in one day” as the locals like to say, but I grant them two seasons. Differences of 20C degrees in daytime highs within just a couple of days are not unheard of. There are also more extreme weather events – rains are usually shorter and heavier than in Finland, hot periods are really hot, high UV radiation is really high (UV index of up to 12 vs the high of 6 Finland reaches in summer) etc. Still, summer by Finnish standards lasts maybe 9 months of the year, and there’s beach weather to be found from at least 6 of the warmer months. The Economist aptly pointed out in the special report on Australia last year that the weather is “benign and beautiful much of the time, but often by turns scorching, soaking, dehydrating, burning, blowing, parching, cyclonic, cancer-causing and generally destructive.”

• Good availability of a wide range of organic food is one of the best things in Australia. You can find pretty much everything as an organic version and the price premiums are lower than they are in Finland. Food supply seasonality is also much more visible here – fruits are absolutely delicious when they are in season, and many are simply unavailable when they are out of season. Over 95% of the fruit and veggies sold here are domestic. In Finland, where much of the fresh fruit & veggies are imported for much of the year, everything tends to be available year round – but also tends to have a pretty bland taste for much of the year.

• The nature is simply awesome and there’s a lot of variety from deserts to beaches to rainforests to rivers, from flatlands to mountains (well, closer to real mountains than the hills in Finland anyway) and numerous exotic animals.

• Unfortunately there is also a ubiquitous lack of quality that is apparent in many things; from houses that are built in the cheapest possible way to clothes and workmanship (and to child care, as mentioned), the median level of quality in pretty much everything is lower than that in Europe. That’s not to say good quality cannot be found – it can – but unless you go look for it, the average experience is worse.

• There’s lots of variety between the cities; I haven’t visited all the big ones yet, but it seems fairly accurate to compare Melbourne to Boston and Sydney to New York (and Canberra to, oh I don’t know, maybe Columbus Ohio or perhaps Washington DC? ) – the atmosphere and vibe of the cities differs markedly, which is probably a good thing, giving everyone a choice of where they fit best.

• Australia has somehow – whether it is a reality or an illusion, I cannot tell yet – managed to brand its countryside as a “cool”, desirable place. Life in the Finnish countryside never really appealed to me that much, but for some reason moving to rural areas has become an appealing possibility here. Not to the in-the-middle-of-nowhere outback, mind you, but outside the major population centers. Maybe it’s the plethora of organic farms (some of which we’ve visited) or the good quality of the meat and produce, maybe partly thanks to the Royal Melbourne Show or the picturesque scenery when driving there or just a desire to raise kids somewhere peaceful and quiet, who knows.

Finally, I have become much more interested in the theory and practice of raising TCKs, the so-called Third Culture Kids. Plenty of those, and ATCKs (Adult Third-Culture Kids), here. I have somehow always thought of myself as one, but have not paid too much attention to it – now that it appears we are raising TCKs, the topic is back on my mind. It’s a tough and complex topic that I will return to in another post.

So I set about to educate myself, and our kids, about the trees here. After some research, I concluded that the best book to do that with would be CSIRO’s publication Forest Trees of Australia by Boland et al. This is one massive text; at over 700 pages and 2+ kilograms in weight, it’s hardly a field guide – but it is, from what I can tell anyway, an extremely comprehensive text about trees in Australia. It begins with a short introduction covering the trees, climate, topography, soils, microbes, fire effects and other factors affecting trees here.

The bulk of the text consists of species descriptions, over 300 of them, each species with two pages. The left-hand page contains the common names and botanical names, related species, climate where the species lives, map of its distribution, descriptions of the bark, leaves, cones, fruits, wood etc – interestingly including points about forestry uses, such as durability, wood density and common uses. The page on the right-hand side has a dozen or so pictures of the tree bark, leaves, fruits, flowers etc. Unfortunately the vast majority of the photos in the book are black-and-white, but the photos are extremely clear and come with size guides.

Towards the end of the book there is an extensive glossary and the usual references & an index. Due to its heft, it’s a book that I will likely never read every page of, but it is absolutely fascinating reading. For example, I did not know that the Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans) here is, at up to 100m in height, the second-largest tree species in the world, only exceeded in height by the California redwoods.

Another revelation that the book brought with it is that there are lots of different species of trees here, many of which look very similar to each other. This makes accurate identification somewhat painful. There are a total of approximately 30 tree species in Finland – over here, just the eucalyptus genus has over 700 species. Given time, I am sure I will learn to identify some of the most common ones, but all of them? Forget it. Never going to happen. While a more compact field guide may come in handy at some point (the most compact of them all, the Leafsnap app by Columbia University, doesn’t really work well here), the Forest Trees of Australia is an indispensable reference loaded with fascinating information.

The truth, of course, is a bit more complicated and nuanced than just flat-out “yes” or “no”. In some respects Australia certainly is behind – fixed broadband connections, for example, are relatively expensive and slow. With the NBN (of which many abroad are still blissfully ignorant about), that should change quite dramatically in the next few years. Houses are by and large insulated poorly and it remains a cruel fact that I have never been colder in my life than in Australia during winters. Despite the temperature practically never going below +5C or +10C during the day, I have been warmer in Finland in -30C weather indoors than indoors here.

Then there’s the other side of the coin. Mobiles are one good example – having grown up in Finland, I grew up with the expectations that mobiles need to work everywhere, all the time. While the Vodafone network has been experiencing major pains, I have been quite impressed by the Telstra “NextG” network (which btw is a standard HSPA+ network despite the odd name – and for full disclosure, I work for Telstra), as I expected much worse performance and coverage.

But what’s been even more impressive in the mobiles space are the devices – ever since arriving here, the nation seemed to be dominated by iPhones. The iPhone still grabs by far the #1 spot in smartphone sales (which, in turn, make up a bigger percentage of total mobile sales than pretty much in any other country), though Android has made a strong entry over the past 18 months. People in the mobile industry sometimes lament the fact that all attention is now on smartphones, whereas the vast majority of the devices in use are not smartphones. Over in Australia, however, that’s no longer true – the majority of the devices out there are smartphones, and featurephones are practically irrelevant from a future-looking service perspective. And while it may not be a sign of progress per se, I suspect Australia has the largest install base (percentage-wise) of iPhones in the world. That has some interesting implications in terms of service take-up and the kind of services that are developed. It’s safe to say Australia today is ahead in the smartphone adoption curve compared to, say, Finland, the cradle of the mobile phone.

Another aspect is the energy-efficiency and environmental awareness. It’s a very ironic thing that a country where the existing housing stock’s appalling inefficiency (only very recently has respectable energy-efficiency begun to be required from new buildings) leads to enormous waste of energy, a country where most electricity is generated by the dirtiest means possible (coal) and a country that has one of the highest carbon-footprints in the world, still manages to have a much more environmentally conscious vibe to it than, say, Finland. This is of course a generalization, but more people here are more environmentally aware than in most other parts of the world. Maybe it’s because Australia is no stranger to the effects of climate change or adverse climate in general, but the fact that 38% of the global organic food production is in Australia is very telling. Water conservation is taken seriously, Australia led the world in phasing out incandescent bulbs, residential solar hot water as well as PV solar systems are common and Permaculture, what can possibly end up being the most important contribution to humankind’s survival ever, has its origins in Australia.

It’s a paradoxical situation – while there is no doubt that Europe as a whole is more energy-efficient than Australia, the topic of energy-efficiency and environmental awareness is at the societal level taken more seriously here and with greater respect. While, for example, many Finns say they want to support local food production and organic foods, they too rarely put their money where their mouth is – whereas organic farms thrive here, with a great deal of grassroots activity. It’s more of a bottom-up approach here where in Finland people seem to assume the government will take care of these things, a more top-down mode of thinking which at least occasionally is somewhat naive.

But to get back to the point – for foreigners to think of Australia being always a few years behind in everything is a bit dangerous and a bit self-conceited. Certainly the culture is different from that, say, of famously risk-taking America, and definitely one can easily find many things that could use an improvement. Some things drive you downright crazy. But that goes with the territory of living in another culture and it’s equally easy to find counter-examples of aspects that are taken care of better here than in many other places.

The path of information and idea exchange between Australia & the rest of the world should be a two-way road, benefiting all parties involved – and there is plenty of scope for such movement both ways.

While the industrial-scale production is lacking in Australia, the residential production is doing a bit better. About a year ago, Australia had about 200,000 households using solar PV panels for electricity production, and that figure is increasing rapidly. Many, many more households have solar hot water systems in place. Both systems enjoy significant government incentives which unfortunately are being slowly scaled back.

Anyhow, to satisfy my curiosity and desire to understand in detail how the residential-scale systems work, I read the Solar Electricity Handbook – 2011 Edition by Michael Boxwell. This is a book that covers residential solar deployments in quite some detail, but focuses purely on residential PV panels. Now, one can be forgiven to think solar is easy – after all, how complicated can it be slap a panel on a roof and plug it in? Turns out it can be surprisingly complicated and the Solar Electricity Handbook is there the show you how.

The book basically covers pretty close to everything you need to know when planning, dimensioning, selecting, installing and operating a solar PV system for residential use. Some of the more interesting things to note for me were the various inefficiencies introduced by a number of the system components and features (batteris, MPPT, inverters, temperature etc), the numerous complexities introduced by systems with battery storage and the inherent dangers in solar panels.

Even such basic things as making sure the roof can handle the panel loads – and remembering that there can be a significant upwards lifting loads on the panels in windy conditions – easily slip the minds of a “layperson” such as myself, so it was interesting to learn about such details. Other news to me was the somewhat disappointing revelation that the vast majority of grid tie-in systems will shut down if the grid shuts down – grid fallback systems, on the other hand, continue to operate if grid power is lost. Also, it’s essentially impossible to switch a solar panel off – hence the connections and circuit breakdown conditions need to be managed carefully or they can easily lead to overheating or even fire. On a positive surprise-side, some people have occasionally complained of poor carbon payback times of the panels due to high production emissions; turns out the panels, depending on the method of manufacture, have carbon payback times of only 3-5 years – considering the panels have a lifetime of 20-30 years or even more, that’s a pretty good figure I think.

Solar in Australia is a no-brainer. Finland, however, seems like a pretty useless place for solar electricity when you first think about it. I was, however, surprised to find out that where the irradiance levels of Melbourne in December is 6.24 kWh/m2/day, it reaches 5.74 kWh/m2/day in Helsinki in July; so the output during the best times of the year do not radically differ between Melbourne and Finland. The story is obviously quite different in the winters, with Melbourne having irradiance levels of 4.07 kWh/m2/day even during the worst month (May), whereas the Helsinki winter level in December is a downright pathetic 0.66 kWh/m2/day. An additional complication to having any significant solar electricity generation take place in Finland is that the peak power usage occurs in exactly the opposite time of the year than peak production, whereas the peak production & consumption times align much better over here.

What comes to the Solar Electricity Handbook, it’s a great resource for planning and installing residential solar PV systems. It covers all the basics and the quirks introduced by different systems, and the online resources at http://solarelectricityhandbook.com/ are very useful. It does not, however, cover the most recent developments in any great depth, such as Solar Edge‘s technology of distributed maximum power point tracking, but the handbook definitely provides a good, solid foundation for anything thinking of installing PV solar systems.

Summer was full on in January; spending the New Year’s eve at blistering temperatures, brought down by a massive thunderstorm was an interesting contrast to the typical freezing January-temperatures in Finland.

Our small yard is home to a plethora of interesting creatures. From the early summer cicadas to year-round possums, in February this praying mantis was casually walking around. Later in the year it was followed by stick insects and other critters, but luckily no snakes or poisonous spiders around – yet.

One of the best things about Melbourne (for a family anyway) are the numerous suburban parks; this shot from March is from one of the about dozen parks within a half an hour’s walk from our home.

Another cool thing are the zoos; this shot from April from the Werribee Open Range Zoo is a good example – zoos here are very nice, from both the animals’ perspective (to the extent captivity is good for any animal) and the visitors.

I have been very positively surprised how well we can go on bush- and other walks with our kids. There are many pram-accessible trails and recently even our almost-2-year-old Benjamin has been bravely walking over 3km trips. I think that’s awesome; it means we can get back to our long nature walks much sooner than I anticipated. In May we visited Phillip Island, this shot from the end of the island.

June, the first “summer month” in Finland is fall time over here. While there are not that many coniferous trees in the Melbourne area, Carlton Gardens in the city becomes a spectacular sight in June.

July, the mid-winter, is a good time to enjoy the city and escape to some of the art galleries or cafes to escape from the “cold”. National Galleries Victoria always has some nice installation around their outdoor fountains:

Melbourne is famous for its innovative architecture; this shot from August is a walking bridge near South Bank. The construction reminds me of the typical house insulation here

In September I had the opportunity to take an all-too-rare business trip to one of my favorite cities, San Francisco, for a mobile conference. Loved the city, as always.

In October we took a road trip to Sydney and Blue Mountains. In Sydney we had some hot days perfect for hitting the famous beaches, some cooler days better for sightseeing – Blue Mountains, however, were more like White Mountains. As we didn’t quite expect this chilly conditions, we will have to return to Blue Mountains later for a proper bushwalking experience.

Organic produce and excellent selection of fruit and veggies is a delight to foodies like us. This is our local organic food store in November. Now, with the Queensland floods, the prices of some fruits is bound to go temporarily up by as much as 50%, but thankfully Victoria has fared better without catastrophic crop losses this year, even if we, too, had a drought-breakingly wet spring.

In December summer finally started properly, with the first over +40C day late in the month. This picture is from a place called Hanging Rock.

On Friday a cool front set in, and we were an hour away up in Blue Mountains – which, incidentally, were more like white mountains as snow flurries turned to a snow storm and the landscape was transformed to this:

Talk about a contrast! If we had brought our skis, we could’ve surfed and skied within 36hrs.

Ps. I fully realize the posting frequency to this blog is getting borderline dead. There are a number of reasons for it; on one hand, of the free time I have, I’m spending an increasing time offline and as such, have less time to write lengthy posts. On the other hand, lightweight social media such as Facebook and Twitter have become the de facto channels for posting quick thoughts, links, photos etc. Third, I have a couple of other blogs that I write to. As a natural consequence to these, posting frequency on this blog is now pretty pathetic.

I’m under no illusion that I would have massive readership here, so this development probably hasn’t inconvenienced too many people. Still, the plan is to keep the blog here and post infrequently but occasionally anyway – hope that’s ok.

Anyhow, I was expecting Australia to fall somewhere between Finland and US in terms of online commerce. And most of the times it does, but at times the experience is even worse than in Finland – a big disappointment. First, relatively few companies are online here. There is increasing, but still low, awareness of how to do e-commerce properly (let alone m-commerce, let’s not even go there). Second, shipping, while cheaper than in Finland, takes surprisingly long even from “nearby”. Third, by coincidence or not, it was an Australian online merchant who happened to be the first one to ever lose my credit card details which forced me to get new cards after fraud attempts.

Now, years ago e-commerce really took off with books first, so here is a case study from yesterday about getting a book. I wanted to buy this book. By nature, I first checked Amazon US: $25 AUD plus $17 AUD for expedited international shipping, so $42 AUD total and I could expect to get the book in about 10 days. That doesn’t sound too bad for a big, 750+ pages, hardcover book.

What about the local competition? First up, Borders: sticker shock of $89.95 AUD and a delivery time of 10-12 days. Angus & Robertson was in the same ballpark. Only Dymocks was significantly cheaper at $55 AUD, but still more expensive than Amazon. None of the Australian vendors charged explicit shipping costs, but the high initial price and shipping times of 10-12 days explain why that is so. As a comparison, the book would have cost about $50 AUD including shipping if bought (with)in Finland with a delivery time of 5-15 days (annoyingly wide scale).

Let’s take a look at the figures again:

Remember that Borders, Dymocks and Angus & Robertson are all local, Australian companies and the Amazon US order is shipping from literally the other side of the planet just for me. If one bought more than one book, the figures would be even more favorable for Amazon.

Whenever an individual can import goods from halfway across the planet, while paying for individual express air cargo, for up to 50% less than the domestic companies are charging, some aspect(s) of competition and/or efficient markets are clearly missing.

Isn’t it strange..

• .. that Australia has the biggest houses in the world^[1], while simultaneously being the country that most increases the time spent outdoors for expats?^{[2, 3]} With a culture geared towards the outdoors life and a climate to match, why would people need the biggest indoor dwellings in the world?

• .. that Australia has one of the best solar power generation potential in the world^[4], yet produces over 80% of its electricity with coal?^[5]

• .. that Australia have some of the best-managed and sustainable fisheries in the world^{[6, 7]}, plenty of fresh produce and even wine locally available – i.e. a good potential for an ideal Mediterranean diet – but Australians are still among the most obese (if not the most obese) people in the world? ^{[8, 9]}

• .. that people in Australia are generally friendlier and more willing to help (my subjective experience, of course) than in Finland, despite Finland scoring quite a bit lower on the Hofstede’s individuality index?^[10]

• .. that people consider USA the great “melting pot”, even though only 11% of people in the USA are foreign-born, compared to over 25% in Australia?^{[11, 12]}

Resources

1. Australians live in worlds biggest houses
2. HSBC: Expat Survey
3. HSBC: Offshore offspring
4. Desertec Foundation: Australia’s Concentrating Solar Power Potential
5. Australian Coal Association: Electricity Production
6. Marine Stewardship Council: Certified fisheries
7. Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry: Fisheries resource management
8. Stewart, S: Australia’s Future ‘Fat Bomb’
9. NationMaster: Obesity Statistics
10. Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions: Finland and Australia
11. US Census Bureau: State & Country QuickFacts
12. Australian Bureau of statistics: Over one quarter of Australians were born overseas

Australian roads unique how?

All cars built locally here in Australia are advertised as being “Developed for Australia’s unique road conditions” or something along similar lines. So it’s only natural to ask what’s so unique about Australian roads?



The answer is not much, at least in Victoria. We drove on roads ranging from as big as they get to as small as they get – and I mean half-a-lane-wide-and-in-the-middle-of-the-forest-according-to-the-GPS-small. As a rule, big highways were in excellent condition and most of the smaller roads were in decent shape also. The smaller the roads were, the worse their condition. If the area was flat, the roads were straight. If it was hilly, the roads were windy. This, by the way, is exactly how roads tend to work in all other parts of the world also.



Maybe the ads are referring to the 100km-stretches of straight roads in the middle of nowhere, the heat in the summer (both of which you can get in, say, Arizona) or something, but as of yet I’m unconvinced that there’s anything particularly unique about the roads here.

Guess the speed limit

See this road here? What do you think the speed limit is here?



The correct answer is 100km/h and the correct reaction to that is: oh come on! I mean the highway (or freeway as they like to call highways here) is in perfect condition with great visibility, plenty of lanes to choose from and very mellow turns. Is there really a case for not having the limit at, say, 120km/h or 130km/h?



For the sake of the argument, let’s say 100km/h is a good speed limit for the road above, which it might very well be safety and all considered. Fine. Then let’s take this road here:



Judging with the same criteria that set the highway speed limit at 100km/h, this road – which is generally in a good shape, but with hairpin curves and shoulders the width of 1cm – should have a speed limit of 40km/h or max 60km/h. But no. It’s 100km/h. What the hell?! You drive this at 100km/h and your car can soon be found at the bottom of some gorge.



That is so weird. On road #1 the speed limit is set to bore you to sleep and unduly lengthen the trip, on road #2 it’s set to kill you. That is, umm, inconsistent at best.



Tiny roads having a relatively high speed limit also has the weird consequence that our TomTom GPS unit, always on the lookout for the quickest route, seems to prefer to direct us through some hay-fields on single-lane country roads (which, to their credit, were in pretty good condition) as opposed to the above-pictured freeway to shave 2mins off our travel time over 200km.

Can somebody please explain to me why the Australian media has such an affinity – an obsession, really – to playing with words? There seems to be an editorial requirement that articles need to appear witty or have some clever (or not) wordplay in the headline. Some examples from this week:

• Desal plant figures don’t hold water.
• A surgeon who draws bad blood
• Sun shines on solar plane’s flight
• A corner in Brighton you can bank on (A property leased by a bank auctioned for loads of money)
• So you think you can prance (A Ferrari review)
• Fear and loathing in Aspen
• Qantas acquisition fails to fly

Ha ha. Seriously, why? Sure some are funny and some even clever, but by no means all. Many are downright forced.

Why pay less when you can pay more?

Perhaps the ad agencies also need to spend more time proofreading the ads instead of coming up with clever quips.

Apple needs a better App Store

I’ve been an iPhone user for a couple of weeks now and am loving the device. It’s great. I’ll save the device comments to another post, but I have some issues with the App Store. As extolled as it is, it’s just not very usable as the number of available applications has passed 100,000. Specifically:
• The fact that all apps aren’t available globally sucks. It’s downright evil having applications limited geographically; reminds me of the DVD region code debacle – Australia at least had the sense to put a stop to that (by mandating that all DVD players sold here must be region-free), so what’s with Apple getting away with doing essentially the same thing?
• The App Store user interface is bad; for one, it doesn’t scale well to the iTunes window. Did someone forget to tell Apple that having a window that needs scrolling both sideways and up-down is lame?
• It’s unclear what the categorization is based on what; who decides what goes into “New and noteworthy”? Are they new, noteworthy or both? With 10,000 new app submissions every week, just having “new” apps area doesn’t help much.
• What are the Top charts based on? Downloads? Ratings? I want a way to clearly find the top-rated applications and I want them categorized; most apps are games and I want to browse the catalog without being bombarded by entertainment apps.
• Why can’t I sort the lists by rating? Why can’t I see Amazon-style “People who bought this, also bought ..” recommendations?

The App Store has been a runaway success by any measuring stick, but I foresee some serious scalability and usability problems as the apps keep on piling. Even currently the best method for application discovery is using external Internet sites that classify, review and list the best apps; then you just search & download what you need from the App Store.

Needing a 3rd party for basic app discovery is a clear sign of some trouble.