From Applied Abstractions: The Economist has a review of Kurt Eichenwald's new book on Enron: Conspiracy of Fools : A True Story, finding that top management in Enron were duped by some of their direct reports. It reads like a thriller. I'm just heading over to Amazon...

This book by Leon Gettler invites comparison with The Corporation. Both conclude that the modern corporations can be compared to individuals and are largely pathological in nature. Both represent a fairly scathing critique of most modern corporations. However that's...

For as long as I can remember, one of the deepest connections I have been able to make with my soul is through music - particularly in making my own music on my piano. I have never learnt to play a whole Sonata, but I have it in mind to one day learn Mozart's K331...

Here is Oliver, the latest addition to the Curnow family. We have had pets before. But never a dog! We've had goldfish, guinnea pigs and rabbits (x4 who all died) but never a dog. Miriam is the youngest Curnow and really wanted rabbits nearly ten years ago. Every one...

A few days ago I posted regarding how good I found MT-Blacklist, a spam blocking plugin for the Moveable Type publishing system. Well thanks to a Bleeding Edge Entry I found out about SpamLookup. Developed by Brad Choate, SpamLookup is actually a combination of...

Regular readers of chriscurnow.com will know that one of our goals is to support greater mutual understanding between men and women (and peoples of all kinds, races and backgrounds for that matter.) I have recently come across The Breast Blog - an enterprise of Sue...

A by-product of the upgrade to the new server was opening chriscurnow.com up to trackback spammers. Oh dear, I was getting 20 - 30 a day. Moveable Type v3 certainly makes it easier to delete trackback spam but it doesn't stop it from getting through. When I was using...

The Photo Album is back up after the upgrade to the new server. It only took me two weeks (or was it three.) It actually only took a couple of hours of actual time. I didn't want to reload all the photos, so a lot of time was spent in UNIX, looking around to see how I...

We all know that statistical analysis is used to prove all sorts of things This article [subscription required] in the April 2005 issue of Harvard Business Review discusses the perils of benchmarking. chriscurnow.com has long disliked the notion of benchmarking. We...

One of my favourite commentators is back on his hobby horse again this morning. I am referring to Dr Kevin Donnelly's piece Give academic excellence in state schools a sporting chance in The Age this morning. Dr Donnelly opines that "Competition and excellence in...