How not to do tourism

Insensitivity makes waves with Japanese tourists

Most of the observations in this article about why Japanese tourism to Australia has dropped off seems true. Some of the points make are a bit amusing:

BEFORE Noriko Mochizuki travelled to Australia, she had heard about koalas, kangaroos, beaches, and strange men in cars who killed backpackers.

By the time she returns home to Tokyo, the 25-year-old will tell her friends that - the infamous Ivan Milat backpacker murders aside - Australians are relaxed, kind and sometimes very rude.

''Sometimes you go to buy something at a coffee shop and they don't want to understand or they just ignore you,'' she said during a surfing lesson with Surfs Up near Cronulla.

''The customer service is much, much better in Japan.''

Unfortunately, the customer service in Japan is probably the best in the world, so most Japanese travelling need to take that into account. (But I think most do to an extent.)

As for Australia's attempts to attract tourists again:

Professor Orito said Tourism Australia had done nothing to help itself with the disastrous 'So where the bloody hell are you?' advertising blitz, "whose meaning was lost on the Japanese".

"The campaign last year based on the movie Australia was an even bigger flop."

The problem has been compounded by a series of misguided tourism campaigns, which culminated last year in the ''Aussie Oji" competition, designed to lure Japanese women to Australia to look for their oji, or prince - a message a Japanese tourism expert described as "insensitive''.

One Japanese tourism operator in the Gold Coast said there was no point offering constructive criticism to the Australian tourism industry "because they ignore our complaints about the treatment of tourists. Nothing is going to change."

I think everyone would have to agree that the current New Zealand tourism campaign in Australia is really very good. Why can that little place manage it while we've been failing for more than a decade now?

You don't see that every day...

Have a look at this fascinating sky effect caused during a recent NASA rocket launch. (It happens around the 1.52 mark.):



It is apparently caused by acoustic shock wave travelling through a "sun dog". Looks cool whatever it was.

Drive by wire

Should we be worried that our cars are controlled by software? - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

I didn't realise the extent to which cars had become "drive by wire" until the recent Toyota problems. This article explains all.

Can kitchen gadgets get any sillier?

Autonomous Saucier – auto-stir bot makes for perfect sauces

And here I thought that a cheese heater was about as over-specialised as a kitchen device could possibly be.

A bit of a surprise

An ibuprofen a day could keep Parkinson's disease away, study suggests

The research involved 136,474 people who did not have Parkinson's disease at the beginning of the research. Participants were asked about their use of non-steroid anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), including aspirin, ibuprofen and acetaminophen. After six years, 293 participants had developed Parkinson's disease.

The study found regular users of ibuprofen were 40 percent less likely to develop Parkinson's disease than people who didn't take ibuprofen. Also, people who took higher amounts of ibuprofen were less likely to develop Parkinson's disease than people who took smaller amounts of the drug. The results were the same regardless of age, smoking and caffeine intake.

Things not greener on other side of our fence

Aid workers earning more than Rudd | The Australian

According to the article, being an Australian technical adviser to a near neighbour (and having your salary paid by government aid) can be very, very profitable.

But the reason I post about this is more because of this line:

...AusAID believes it is necessary to pay such amounts to persuade people with the needed skills to work in a place such as Port Moresby, recently listed by The Economist as the third-least liveable city in the world.

And to think, when I was a kid, there were always advertisements on TV for holidays to PNG.

How the market works in Dubai

Pepsi, Coke prices in UAE likely to increase

Why on earth is the government of UAE involved in this at all?? Are they scared of fizzy drink riots in the streets if the price of Pepsi and Coke gets too high??:

The Ministry of Economy will decide on a price increase request for Pepsi and Coca-Cola products by the end of next week, a top official said.

"We have received the request from both companies and we will send it to the higher committee of consumer protection for approval," Ahmad Abdul Aziz Al Shehi, director-general of the Ministry of Economy (MoE) told Gulf News in a recent interview.

Though the two companies have not stated the price yet, Al Shehi said that if approved, the increase would be less than 100 per cent.

So, as the current price of a regular can is Dh1, its new price would be under Dh2.

In all GCC countries except the UAE and Qatar, Pepsi and Coca-Cola prices have increased. While the proposal for an increase was given a year ago, the situation has changed and the companies have a better argument at this point, Al Shehi said.

Al Ahlia Gulf Line, manufacturer and distributor of Coca-Cola products in the UAE, said that it had several meetings with the MoE for a price increase request.

"We have maintained our price in [the] UAE for the past 22 years but with an increase in almost all raw materials and costs involved in the manufacturing of products ...there should be now a price review," Antoine Tayyar, Public Affairs and Communications Director for The Coca-Cola Export Corporation, Middle East said in a statement.

Amazing.

Things that make me happy, No 3

Series 3 of The IT Crowd is on ABC.

With the first episode last week, I thought it may be approaching shark jumping territory. The laugh track seemed way too pumped up for the jokes, and Jen had a very strange hair style.

But tonight, the second episode was much better. If you know the show, you'll understand how funny this bit was.

Mad clinic design

Dezeen MD. net Clinic Akasaka by Nendo

Japanese designers Nendo have completed the interior of a mental health clinic in Akasaka, Tokyo, where none of the doors open and patients and staff instead move around the building by opening sections of the walls.

Yes, because we can all imagine how people attending a psychiatric clinic would like to be confused and tricked by a bunch of fake doors.

You can see photos of the place, which looks to me more like some sort of trick house from Disneyland than a medical clinic, at the link above.

Conspiracy corner

David Aaronovitch’s ‘Voodoo Histories’ - Review - NYTimes.com

This review of The Times columnist's book on 20th century conspiracy theories sounds like it could be a good and entertaining read. I like this extract:

Of those who claim that the Pentagon was not hit on 9/11 by a terrorist-piloted American Airlines Flight 77, Mr. Aaronovitch sarcastically observes: “But there is always the possibility, however extraordinarily remote, that DNA might have been planted to the exact specifications of the missing passengers, crew and employees, that wreckage might somehow have been placed at the scene within minutes of the crash, and that the real occupants of the missing Flight 77 might have been spirited away to some unknown place, there to be butchered or to live in the world’s weirdest witness protection program.”

Ocean Acidification and the PETM

An Ominous Warning on the Effects of Ocean Acidification by Carl Zimmer: Yale Environment 360

Quite a good article here explaining a recent paper that compared the rate of acidification 55 million years ago during one gigantic natural disaster to the current circumstances.

Here's a key paragraph:

Ridgwell and Schmidt found that ocean acidification is happening about ten times faster today than it did 55 million years ago. And while the saturation horizon rose to 1,500 meters 55 million years ago, it will lurch up to 550 meters on average by 2150, according to the model.

The PETM was powerful enough to trigger widespread extinctions in the deep oceans. Today’s faster, bigger changes to the ocean may well bring a new wave of extinctions. Paleontologists haven’t found signs of major extinctions of corals or other carbonate-based species in surface waters around PETM. But since today’s ocean acidification is so much stronger, it may affect life in shallow water as well. “We can’t say things for sure about impacts on ecosystems, but there is a lot of cause for concern,” says Ridgwell.

Ocean acidification skeptics from Plimer down are always arguing that the oceans didn't die when CO2 was much higher than today. The answer to that point is again explained clearly in the article:

A hundred million years ago, there was over five times more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the ocean was .8 pH units lower. Yet there was plenty of calcium carbonate for foraminifera and other species. It was during this period, in fact, that shell-building marine organisms produced the limestone formations that would eventually become the White Cliffs of Dover.

But there’s a crucial difference between the Earth 100 million years ago and today. Back then, carbon dioxide concentrations changed very slowly over millions of years. Those slow changes triggered other slow changes in the Earth’s chemistry. For example, as the planet warmed from more carbon dioxide, the increased rainfall carried more minerals from the mountains into the ocean, where they could alter the chemistry of the sea water. Even at low pH, the ocean contains enough dissolved calcium carbonate for corals and other species to survive.

Today, however, we are flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide at a rate rarely seen in the history of our planet. The planet’s weathering feedbacks won’t be able to compensate for the sudden drop in pH for hundreds of thousands of years.

An interesting case to follow

Ray Gosling refuses to talk to police after confessing he 'killed lover'

It'll be pretty interesting to follow what happens here. He has said he won't repeat this to the police, but there is no reason why a confession to a third person can't be used. The police will presumably be able to track down the doctor who Gosling says impliedly invited him to smother his lover:

In an interview today, Mr Gosling said that the doctor on duty that afternoon had effectively invited him to do something, by deliberately leaving him alone with the dying man.

"Yes, of course the doctor knew (what I had done)," he said.

"There was this moment and the doctor said to me something like: 'I will pop out and have a fag now' or 'go to the canteen' or 'go to another ward – and will you still be here when I get back, Ray?' And I said, 'Ye-es'.

"It was an invitation. Why do doctors leave extra morphine for people who are in extreme pain? 'It's in the drawer, just in case you need it' ... Doctors are doing this every day."

Not sensible doctors, I reckon.

Update: The Independent's article on the matter notes this:

He said the man wasn't even his partner, but "my bit on the side"...

Mr Gosling was suitably vague about both the date, mentioning only that it was in the early days of Aids (presumably the mid-late 1980s), and the location (placing the hospital outside but not too far from Nottingham). He offered no other detail, and assuming he declines to help the police with their enquiries, they will soon be free to close the file and return their attentions to the gun crime of which Nottingham is said to be our capital.

They may even conclude that Mr Gosling made the whole thing up, much like the magazine publisher Felix Dennis when he mentioned in an interview how he summarily executed a wife-beater of his acquaintance by shoving him over a cliff.

Yes, an investigation in circumstances that vague may not come to much.

Noteworthy

Barack Obama gives green light to new wave of nuclear reactors | Environment | guardian.co.uk

It would seem from the article that the cost of a nuclear reactor in the US is about $4.4 billion. It's also interesting to note this:

The Southern reactors are to be built with the new Westinghouse AP1000 design, which Chu said was safer and more economical than the older generation of reactors. "If you lose control, it will not melt down," he said. "Three Mile Island was a partial melt down. It was serious, but on the other hand the containment vessel held."

Chu also disputed a report from the Congressional Budget Office that put the risk of default on loans to the nuclear industry as high as 50%. "We are looking at ways to increase ways of building these projects on time and on budget," he said.

Yes, I would have thought the risk of default on building a power plant would be pretty low.

Waste of time

Bill of rights

A PROPOSAL for Australia to adopt a human rights act appears to have hit the fence after widespread opposition within the federal cabinet.

Senior sources have told the Herald that the proposal, sponsored by the Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, met stiff opposition because it had the potential to shift power from the executive to the judiciary.

No final decision has been made but there is little prospect of an act being adopted.

''Put it this way, there's not a great appetite for a major transference of power from Parliament to the courtroom,'' a source said.

Err, why didn't someone tell McClelland and Father Frank Brennan this before the committee toured the country consulting the tiny fraction of the community that actually had any interest?

Grand Tour recommended

Just a quite note to say how much I have been enjoying Kevin McCloud's Grand Tour documentary series on ABC. It traces the origins of English neo-classical architecture and decoration, explaining that it all arose through the popularity of Italy as a destination from the 1600's onwards for architects (and men of all types) who, as well as having a generally debauched holiday, spent a lot of time sketching and copying ideas to incorporate buildings back in England. Tonight's episode in and around Naples was particularly entertaining, featuring as it did a very eccentric 83 year old woman who seemed to only want to talk about sex.

The episode is currently on iView, and is repeated soon on ABC 2. McCloud is a great host for a travel show like this: enthusiastic, humorous, and able to speak the language.

Hot in Brisbane, and elsewhere

I've long been making the observation that the worst of summer in Brisbane now routinely seems to come in February. This seems different from the 60's and 70's, when I would have said January was the hottest month. But then again, I didn't have quite the same interest in noting the weather as I have now.

Brisbane also gets some periods when the weather feels much hotter than the Weather Bureau seems to be saying it is. This used to be because temperature on the TV and radio came from Brisbane Airport, which is right on Moreton Bay. But they changed that some years ago, so that temperatures were taken from somewhere in the city. In the last few days, however, I have heard the radio referring to Brisbane Airport a lot again. I don't know why.

In any event, the last few days in Brisbane have been stinking hot and humid, despite the Weather Bureau giving out maximums of only 31 degrees or thereabouts. Yesterday was particularly unpleasant. I see that Ipswich had a maximum of 36 degrees, while Brisbane recorded nearly 31. I was somewhere between them, and would say it was definitely close to at least 35 degrees.

We got the edge of a storm last night, and this morning it is ridiculously humid again.

As I have remarked here before, the hottest, most humid nights I have even been through in Brisbane were in a February in a year I couldn't quite recall, but a reader reminded me that it was in 1998. The last few days have not reached quite those heights, but 1998 was an El Nino year as this one is.

Which reminds me, I don't think I posted on the record January temperature that the UAH satellite recorded. To his (very, very slight) credit, Andrew Bolt did note this. Yet strangely, this figure does not seem to have received much attention in the mainstream press, which instead in currently in an obsessive cycle of beating up on errors in any IPCC reports which are ultimately not very important. Real Climate's posts about this are useful as a corrective, and I am sure everyone who reads Andrew Bolt rushes there to see what climate scientists actually say about the issue. (Ha!)

So how hot will February be according to the satellite? I see from this page that it looks like February is on track to be very hot indeed. Will we finally see the 1998 record broken?

Finally, for all of the cheering about "Climategate" from the right wing skeptic/denialist corner of journalism and blogs, you would think that absolutely no one in Australia is supporting the government's ETS. In fact, even to my surprise, today's Newspoll indicates 57% support for it still. Amongst the young and Labor voters, support is still very strong. The weakest support (and the strongest denial of AGW generally) comes, as I always suspected, from older men. (Although, again to my surprise, the figures for "warming is at least partly caused by humans" is pretty high even in that group.)

This gives me some cheer that Australians might not be as easily swayed as the British and Americans, and perhaps this supports my argument that, apart from the current rubbish journalism, the snowy winter in those places has been very persuasive on public opinion.

Still, as the average audience for a Christopher Monckton talk has shown, it would appear that retired men don't have sheds to potter around in any more. Instead, they sit on their computers listening to a skeptic echo chamber all day.

Sounds about right

Alexander McQueen | Fashionistas are freaks

I don't know who George Pitcher is*, but his rant against the fashion industry following the death of Alexander McQueen (a name that previously escaped this blog's - and I suspect most of the public's - attention until now) has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald (originally from The Telegraph.) It's a rant worth repeating:

...the fashion industry that he dominated is one of the least attractive legal activities on earth, populated by weirdo artists, freakish PRs and emaciated and mentally disordered models. To be even tangentially exposed to it is to enter a world of phoneys and airheads, mutually massaging the pointlessness of each other's professional existence, self-regarding to a degree that would make Narcissus blush, committed only to ripping off a market made docile by cocaine, champagne and the odd canape. Fashion is a chimera of a real industry, the absence of which would harm no one other than its self-serving catamites and courtesans. It is a disgusting place to make a living.

* I see now from Wikipedia that he is a journalist and has worked in PR, and is now an Anglican priest. As a priest he is apparently not conservative, but not gay either.

Another career path overtaken by technology

Sexing chickens: Hey little hen | The Economist

According to the article, chicken sexing is a huge industry (needed to determine the fate of unfortunate rooster babies before they get fed too much.)

Yet a technology to sniff out the genders while they are in the egg has been perfected.

3D TV not so likely?

ABC The Drum Unleashed - Keep doing that and you'll go blind

Interesting article here by someone who should know the problems with 3D technology (seeing he was working on a Sega system which was never deployed.) He reckons that long term exposure to 3D is likely to be bad for the brain.

I just find it very hard to believe that 3D TV would be a worthwhile experience. I still haven't seen Avatar, but probably will some day. The only recent 3D movie I have seen is Monsters V Aliens, and as I wrote here before, the effect to me seemed to be of watching action on a intricate diorama, especially when there are action sequences taking place in the city. This is curious effect and enjoyable enough in its own way (it was like watching a movie unfold on the world's biggest train set) but it didn't in any particular sense make it feel "more real". Of course, it was a cartoon, so that may be an unrealistic expectation, but I am a little curious as to whether Avatar induces a similar feeling in me.

In any event, even with a 90 minute film, I found the 3 D system a bit tiring, so I am not at all sure how I will go with Avatar in 3D.

I just can't see the point of wanting to view most things in 3D on TV.

Shellfish can mess with your mind

Neuroskeptic: Beware The Clam of Forgetfulness

Fascinating story here about a rare problem with clams and mussels:

It turns out that there's a neurotoxin, domoic acid, which can indeed cause brain damage including memory loss. It's produced by certain algae, and can accumulate inside shellfish, especially mussels.

Domoic acid is responsible for amnesic shellfish poisoning, which struck a cluster of over 100 people in Canada in 1987; 4 died, and several others suffered permanent neurological symptoms, including epilepsy and most notoriously, anterograde amnesia, the inability to form new memories.

This could be a useful plot device in a movie:  criminal scientist tracks down witnesses to some evil deed he has committed and makes them forget by giving them doses of domoic acid.  [Maybe he has them over for mussels :) ]

Anyhow, I can apparently rest assured that I won't be killed by mussels or have my memory erased:

Since 1987, there have been no further cases in humans, thanks to shellfish harvesting regulations.

I certainly hope that's a failsafe system they have in place now.