Acumen

The COVID-19 pandemic is both a public health crisis, and a digital technology accelerant. Pre-pandemic, our economic and social activities were done predominantly in cities. We connected and we innovated in these centralised locations.

It took a chance meeting between Cameron van den Dungen, founder of a start-up mattress company, and Madhu Bhaskaran, an engineering professor at RMIT University, to see an opportunity to collaborate and commercialise research.

As Australia’s struggle with the Astra Zeneca vaccination rollout continues in part because of our reluctance to the get the jab, why are we not looking to tobacco, alcohol, confectionary, gambling for guidance? These industries have convinced us to consume their potentially harmful goods and services for years. Their over consumption is regarded as problem behaviour, and the tactics they use may help to inform our government strategy.

Australia is a developed and mature society and is highly dependent on key critical systems at both the national and state level. These systems have become more dominant as the Information Age has developed. We can group these together and describe them as critical infrastructures; infrastructures so vital that if it is incapacity or destroyed it would have a debilitating impact on our defence / national security as well as our daily lives.

Recently, there has been a call by the President of the United States, Joe Biden for greater transparency and co-operation relating to provision of relevant data regarding origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Previously, there was a general dismissal of any indication that the virus leaked from a lab.

What makes a great entrepreneurial city? While many urban planners, policy and business leaders thought in terms of infrastructure, buildings and streets, Jane Jacobs had a very different answer: Empowered people and their vibrant lives.

Queenie Tan is full of financial advice. Whether it is cheap date ideas, buying furniture, saving your first $100,000, doing your tax return or investing in Dogecoin, there is seemingly no topic the 24-year-old Sydney woman can’t confidently tackle.

In this article, the authors (Ahmad and Nazim) outline a vision for a new ethical leadership paradigm that promotes green behavior. They propose that the key is to foster ‘eco-ethical work practices’ – by combining ethical leadership and ‘green’ human resource management. The separation of environmental performance setting and human resource management acts as a barrier to leadership of this type. Ahmad and Nazim argue that the two must be brought together to promote green behaviour in businesses. They provide their top tips for business leaders.

WINTER is just a week away and with it a huge opportunity to reinvigorate the city by keeping public spaces open late. Opening the NGV and State Library and other public libraries until 10pm is a novel idea to create activity without too much hassle.

In Part 1 I outlined why I am sceptical of models that estimate the carbon footprint of Bitcoin to be the equivalent of a small country. Among other reasons, an unknown proportion of Bitcoin miners are using clean energy, such as hydro, wind, or solar. Bitcoin mining is also being used to stabilise energy grids and to reduce emissions from gas flares.

Most people believe that personality is generally very stable—and in many ways, they’re right. If you are an extravert, for example, it’s not quite possible for you to turn into an introvert overnight.

Australia’s COVID recession hurt women more than men, and not only in job numbers. With schools and childcare centres closed, many women who remained in paid work had no choice but to take on more unpaid work, effectively working double shifts. Yet much of the government’s budget response involved high-viz vests and hard hats.

Public cultural institutions such as museums and art galleries around the world may soon be required to assign a monetary value to their collections for financial reporting purposes.

With the large influx of retail investors into the share market, the growth of investment in exchange-traded funds (ETFs) has been explosive in Australia. ETFs have become a popular choice for many young investors. In particular, thematic ETFs are trendy investments for mum and dad investors in the market. This article explains what an ETF is, the latest growth in ETFs, thematic ETFs, and factors to consider before investing in thematic ETFs.

Time for destructive and narcissistic leaders is fast running out. Warning signals, in the rapidly changing world, are clearly pointing towards a new economic order that is crying loud that care, consideration and compassion, all together is the new currency that is needed to run the world that is emerging out of the pandemic crisis of 2020.

The buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) industry has grown tremendously in the recent 3 years and it has even withstood the economic turbulence during the COVID-19 crisis. Recently, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia announced that it will also offer its own BNPL services. Competition among BNPL services might benefit consumers with better choices and deals. Nonetheless, a larger variety of BNPL providers does come with hidden risks.

In this piece re-published from the Business and Human Rights Centre blog, Sara Todt describes why garment workers are at the forefront of democracy protests in Myanmar, and how you, as a consumer, can support them. Sara Todt draws on January 2021 interviews with garment workers in Myanmar conducted for her PhD dissertation.

In this piece re-published from the Business and Human Rights Centre blog, Professor Penelope Weller tells an optimistic story about the transformation that the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System is bringing about in mental health services. She sees it as one that brings respect for human rights to the centre of mental health care in the state of Victoria, Australia.

The COVID-19 global pandemic has been transformative across many sectors of the Australian economy and this is especially true of the gambling sector. The gambling landscape changed significantly in March 2020 with the closure of venues and the disruption to many sporting activities which form the basis of betting markets. Australia has the highest per capital expenditure on gambling in the world and with that comes the highest losses too.

It’s curious that we spend so much effort designing our physical spaces, from our houses to our cities, yet we spend so little energy purposefully designing our information spaces which now occupy so much of our attention and time.