Humble Opinions

Edible fungi...

The ecological fallacy: How to spot one and tips on how to use one to your advantage

Weekend of 14-15 January, I took a Tow Endorsement course in preparation for the SIV course later in the month. This is the final flight. Thanks for Roger Stanford (Winch-operator & organiser), and Chris Rogers (Instructor) Getting ready Lift the wing Take up Slack Go! Go! Go! One step and ... airborne A little left break to control yaw Past the "danger zone" Looks easy now another 30 metres or so more height before release About to release

Extracted from an email exchange with a student today: Hello X, I was wondering why it has taken you until Week#13 to notice that there wasn't a grade recorded for you for an assignment submitted in Week#4, but your records have answered it for me. There isn't a grade for the assignment because you didn't do the assignment. BlackBoard records show that you accessed the site only once in the first four weeks (16 August) to download the unit outline. Up to the date of the Progress Report you hadn't accessed iLecture, or the Progress Report guidelines, or any other aspect of the unit. In the four teaching weeks up to 7 Oct, you were a little more active, spending less than five seconds on the Group Project pages, and accessing the tutorial for Week#6. In the final four weeks of classes, you accessed the Week#10 tutorial, and spent about two hours on Qualtrics. That may be more than some in the class, but I doubt it. To summarise, in more than three months, you have done t...

Northern Beaches goes to Bright from Hume Winzar on Vimeo . Kirstin organised a group to travel to the legendary Mystic Hill, Bright in Northern Victoria over the Labour Day Weekend, October 2009. Nine enthusiastic novices, with experience ranging from 60+ hours to about 10 minutes, took part. Rain and fickle wind ruined much of the five days, but we had a great time, expanded our skills and knowledge, and saw memorable flights, especially from Nico, Marc, James, and Kirstin. Here is a sample.

Sometimes the deities smile and the reasons we become academics converge and we have a great time as both scholars and lovers of life. This last weekend has been pretty good. I presented a research paper on Friday, curtesy of the Business School at University of Adelaide. The topic was my ongoing study on application of Complexity Theory to undrestanding consumer/market behaviour. There were many more people in attendance than I had anticipated. People went away saying that it was worthwhile and there were lots of questions that got me thinking more clearly about where next to take the project, so it was definitely worthwhile for me. On Saturday I ran a workshop on Best-Worst scaling and how to link that in with conjoint measurement. That went for an hour longer than expected and again everyone felt it was worthwhile. Amongst those two events I was able to catch three shows as a part of the Adelaide Fringe Festival, and take in three wineries in the Adelaide Hills, and then fi...

These images posted, with permission, from the Gallery at fishrock.com.au A belated post summarising a part of my journey to Sydney from Brisbane. My first plan was to make a circuitous route from Brisbane along the coast and then inland to the town of Manilla over perhaps two weeks. But that really was going to be more driving than it was worth. First stop was South West Rocks, about an hour North of Port Macquarie, where I took pot luck on accommodation, staying two nights at the Sea Breeze Hotel right on the water overlooking Port Macquarie beach. I met a couple of lovely people there - Kieran Hartley and his friend Suzanne Ison. I'll be keeping in touch with them. Next day I went scuba diving! Port Macquarie has some of the most amazing diving that I have yet experienced. The main feature is an underwater cave. At 126 metres long and completely dark inside. Each entrance is guarded by a wobegong shark, not the cute little half-metre creatures that you'll often s...

Acknowledgment: Picture by Stefan Brandlehner on Flickr i.e. those are Stefan's feet, not mine. But they could have been. I've been wanting to fly Rainbow for a while now. In fact I and two of my flying buddies, Tashi and Reid, had arranged to go there several weeks ago, but the weather forecast was not encouraging. Now that I'm heading off to live in Sydney the project had taken on some urgency. So I headed up on Boxing day morning and returned last night. Despite the season, there was room for a one-man tent at the camping and caravan ground. Rainbow Beach is a little over three hours drive North of Brisbane. It's the staging post for 4WD enthusiasts and beach-fishing types to cross by ferry to Frazer Island or to drive along the beach at the edge the famous Cooloola National Park The "shorter" route, calculated by whereis.com or your GPS navigator, has you driving for nearly 100Km along corrugated dirt roads to Rainbow. Maybe this is a practical ...

I'm progressively getting better at paragliding. I'm still pumped after an excellent flight this afternoon at Beechmont, inland from the Gold Coast. Ridge-soaring and some thermals that kept me up for more than 40 minutes! Next weekend we'll be up again. These pics taken by my daughter, Grace. That's me with the orange wing with "silver" trim. Tashi Sherpa has the custom purple wing.

My grandson, Charles Francis Fleming, was born last week. Mother, Lauren, is tired & sore but very happy. Charles is healthy. Father, Mitchell, is beside himself. And I am officially old. [Wt: 8 lb (3.6Kg) All fingers and toes. Feeding well.]

I came to Adventure and Party City with the intention of taking another bungy jump off a high bridge, but that hasn't happened yet. Two days were spent with colleagues from Griffith Uni taking a brief holiday after the conference - main activities: drinking, eating, drinking, bonding, slandering previous heads-of-department, current deans, pro-vice-chancellors and associated sociopaths, and drinking. Worth doing. Now I've converted an Introduction to Paragliding day into a full course! The Intro day was exhausting. And painful. The day involves learning how to make a safe takeoff, and a relatively safe landing. Takeoff involves racing downhill as fast as you can trying to imitate an angry goose - chest and head down, arms stretched out high behind your back holding on to the glider controls. The result usually is to pull the glider in front of you so that it pulls you over onto your face, or lower one hand/control just slightly so the wing moves suddenly to one side an...

The ANZMAC conference in Dunedin, New Zealand, was a lot better than expected. I arrived a couple of days earlier to attend the Doctoral Colloquium with one of my PhD students, Jannie Adamsen. Jannie found it all really helpful to meet with other Doctoral candidates, potential examiners and professors who may be able to offer advise. It was fun for me too. Good to see how other candidates tackle their problems and how other supervisors manage. Some students were doing trivial rubbish, some were trying to solve all ultimate questions at once, and some were doing stuff that could be really useful. And It was really gratifying to not hear a single mention of the "five chapters model" for a PhD - a rigid template approach that seems to me is designed for witless students, and supervisors with zero abstract thinking skills. The good people at CENGAGE (was Thomson Learning) had set up a big display featuring the new Marketing Research text book I've written with St...

Sri Lanka is a wonderful country! I'm here for only a week and my dear friend Amal KarunaRatna, with whom I started my PhD program with about 20 years ago, is my host. It's also a poor country. Crippled by a constant war between the Singhalese Sri Lankans and the Tamil Tigers in the North for the country, plus inept and corrupt government and inefficient bureaucracy, the country has only rudimentary basic infrastructure: roads, schools, and other services. Bureaucrats are so poorly paid that things get done only when they're bribed, or they're commanded to by their bosses, who have been bribed. Teachers and hospital employees are terribly poorly paid. Today our driver, Mohinda, was picked on by a tired and frustrated police officer and was fined 1000 Rupees (about $13), about two day's pay. To take care of the fine, we had to go to one place to get the forms to fill out, then another place to actually hand over the cash, and a third place to recover the dr...

I took a couple of days off to see Gallipoli, the site of the WWI fiasco that killed thousands of Australians and New Zealanders (and French and Canadians, and Britons) in a useless attempt to capture some territory held by Turkish forces so as to control the Bospherus Strait, linking he Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Many more Turks also were killed, so it's of great importance to them as well. More importantly, the Turkish defense was commanded by a Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal, the man who soon after lead the Young Turks movement, essentially a political rebellion against the old military guard, that created a united Turkey. Ataturk saw that long prosperity for Turkey lay with the progressive West rather than with the East. So the story of Gallipoli is something that all Turkish children learn about. Kemal Ataturk ; (Inscription on Gallipoli Memorial put up by Turkey in 1934, also on Ataturk Memorial at Tarakina Bay, Wellington.) "Those heroes who shed their...

From Braga, Portugal I probably didn't give Braga, Portugal, a fair chance. After all, the VirtualTtourist website lists the 800-year-old city as one of the beautiful cities in the world. It also says that in a very religiously conservative country the people of Braga are the most conservative, verging on fanatical. It certainly showed up in the city's total lack of any nightlife - I went searching for a cafe or bar where there would be people listening to music and talking. There simply aren't any. Maybe it's just that I was in Academic conference mode. The food served at the conference dinners was interesting though. The staple seems to be dried salted codfish, reconstituted in water or milk, served on beans, or inside a pastry, or on bread. And of course thinly sliced ham. That's it. Even then perhaps I'm not being fair. Salt cod (water), salt cod (milk), in pastry (three kinds), on bread, mixed into beans (three kinds), sliced ham, tomatoes, cucu...

Madrid and Barcelona were way too rushed. I spent too much time messing about making arrangements for trains and flights to and from places and too little time just enjoying the places themselves. Anyway, I did get to see some of the wonderful architecture of Gaudi in Barcelona: Park Guell, Casa Batllo, and the cathedral, La Sagrada Familia - still under construction. I got lost in Madrid trying to reach the Prada Museum via the back streets and instead found, in short order, the red-light district, some very up-market apartments, and the financial district where I stumbled into an art gallery just opening an exhibition of neo-realist photography spanning the fascist periods of Spain and Italy through to the late'50s. I should have slept on the train from Madrid to Barcelona but instead spent most of the night in the dining car with a Peruvian family man with a US green card who takes a class in Madrid every Friday for his accounting qualification, a Canadian IT specialist o...

From Last days in ... I succeeded in my first solo crossing of a Cairo street today, and I rode four times in a Cairo taxi in the last two days. So, having faced death, it's time to move on to another challenge. Off to Madrid where the Basque separatists have just announced that their "permanent ceasefire" has expired and they're all set to restart their campaigns. I'm in the cafeteria at Cairo airport. Like all airports, it's a monopolist's paradise - I've just paid the same for a bottle of water as I paid for two people to share a huge lunch earlier in the day. From Last days in ... My guide and friend, Mr Ibrahim, took me for a walk through some parts of old Cairo yesterday afternoon and today. Wonderful history of course, most of which went in one ear and out the other. Not that I was uninterested, but it's hard to keep track of which sultan built which grand mosque to honour which brother he had murdered in order to gain the sultanate ...

From Diving in Dahab I'm staying an extra day in Dahab. I ate with the professional dive instructors from my dive shop last night and I was invited to a party tonight: a local restaurant has just recruited a former student of Jamie Oliver and this is his opening show. Why not stay? I miss a day in Cairo, and almost certainly loose any opportunity to easily take a day-trip to Alexandria. An excursion I'll have to look forward to for the next trip. From Diving in Dahab I made two more dives yesterday, this time armed with an underwater camera borrowed from the dive shop. I've posted some of the results to the online picture gallery: From Diving in Dahab But I've probably finished my diving for a little while. My ears and sinus's were taking a beating, so better to let it go for a bit. So now I'm just taking walks along the shore. Life's pretty tough. From Diving in Dahab

I'd seen just about all of the amazing temples and monuments that I could handle for the moment so I made a spur of the moment decision to change my plans and take the plane from Luxor to Sharm El Sheikh on the night of the 29 May. My booking agent in Cairo and the people at the Luxor airport couldn't have been more helpful. They cancelled my train trip and hotel and bus for the next two days and rearranged to have me collected at 12:30am in Sharm El Sheikh and driven the 120 Km to Dahab. This has saved me more than two days of travelling and sitting about, and give me more time near the Red Sea and back in Cairo. Service and courtesy towards tourists in Egypt is very good. If they could get the toilets to work it would be great. So here I am in Dahab , about half way down the East coast of the Sinai Peninsular. On a clear night you can see the lights of a Saudi city that no-one around here seems to know the name of. The Red Sea is THE place in the world to enjoy scu...

Rushed for the first part but wonderfully relaxing after. The 3:30am start to drive 300Km to Abu Simbel was a pain. Wonderful temple, incredible feat of engineering to move it up the hill away from the waters of the Aswan dam an' all, but was it worth the time and heat and fatigue? Not really. Still, I suppose I can now say that I've done it and seen it. The two day ride down the Nile in a felloucca was just magical. I was so tired after the train ride and the early start the day before that I was exhausted so time spent just lying about and watching the scenery and chatting with some very interesting fellow travellers, or learning from our host, Captain Mohammed, and his regular visits with mates along the way. An interesting side trip was a visit to the once-a-week camel markets in Darow - the largest in Egypt - where camels are brought in from Sudan 1500Km over 45 days for sale to traders, farmers, racers and butchers. (A young eating camel goes for LE4000, a racing c...