Innovation Precincts vs. Cooperative Research Centres

I was wondering what the difference was between the "Innovation Precincts" recently announced by the Australian government and the existing Cooperative Research Centres (CRCs) program was. I even wondered if they were a replacement for the CRCs. Turns out they are intended to be two quite different programs. A very helpful government document explains the differences. Then there are the ARC Linkage grants...

Entropy Explained

Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics has always been a very confusing topic in ecological economics. Tom Murphy explains the difference between information entropy and thermodynamic entropy and what the second law really implies for living and economic systems. Apparently, von Neumann is to blame for all the confusion. He also supposedly told Nash that his Nash equilibrium result was "trivial", though it won Nash the Nobel Prize in economics (with a 45 year delay...).

ANZSEE Conference 2013

The 2013 ANZSEE Conference will take place in November at the Crawford School. All abstracts are due by 26th July. There will both be traditional papers and "working groups" that sound something like panel discussions. The last ANZSEE conference went to was the ANZSEE Conference in Darwin in 2009, which I thought was a great conference. The last ANZSEE or ISEE conference in Canberra was the 2000 ISEE Conference.

Stern and Enflo, Energy Economics

My paper with Kerstin Enflo: "Causality between energy and output in the long-run" has been accepted to be published in Energy Economics. In this case, the published paper will only differ slightly from the working paper version, which I have already blogged about. This is mainly because we only put up the working paper after getting a revise and resubmit from the journal. The question of when to post a working paper is something I have discussed on the blog and thought about quite a bit. We just got a revise and resubmit on this working paper. Our plan, is to add some additional analysis to answer the referees concerns. Even if we end up updating the database the final paper will not be radically different. There are other cases where we completely changed the dataset in response to referee comments. So, in that case, our first working paper was a bit premature.

Update...

I haven't blogged much recently as things have been very busy, teaching, admin, service (reviewing things), and lots of research projects in progress  - 5 papers in review or under revision and at least 12 at various stages from basic research to near completed - almost all my current papers now involve coauthorship. This is also the time of the semester when we also start preparing for the next semester's teaching. I'll be teaching my energy economics course for the second time. And I have been planning my travel over the winter break. First, I am going to Guelph to the workshop on econometric applications in climatology. It's all planned and they've posted my paper. I just need to write a presentation and go. Though I've been to Canada, all my visits so far have been to Quebec. I'll also visit a friend in Virginia. I'll be back here just in time for my students' exam and essay grading. Then I'll be off on another trip that will include Addis Ababa, where the 4th Lead Author meeting of the IPCC Working Group 3 will be held. It's in Addis because one of the co-chairs of the working group is from Ethiopia. Another is from Cuba. That would have been interesting too, but I suppose that no Americans would go to the meeting, which would kind of be a problem... I'll go to some other places too, which maybe I'll report on when I get back :)