Art & About - Sydney's annual outdoor art festival

Sydney's annual mutli-site public art festival Art & About has returned to Sydney again for 2013 with a range of public installations, exhibitions and performances in open spaces. The festival runs from 20 September to 20 October 2013 and has a number of public installations stretching from Circular Quay in the North of the City to Surry Hills in the South - notable this year are the giant brightly coloured snails located in various points in the city. Towering three to three metres high and four and half metres in length ('Smailovation' by title), these noticeable visitors can be found in Hyde Park, Customs House Forecourt, Queens Square and so on.  As with previous festivals, banners with a particular image and message form part of the festival and this year the theme is 'walking men' as part of the international art project, walking-men.com. Banners hanging from street light poles have figures printed in human scale demonstrating how different countries choose to represent the 'common man' in a pictogram.

Another highlight of Art & About is the photography exhibition 'Sydney Life' located in Hyde Park North which captures people and moments of Life around Sydney.Public art festivals such as Art and About are as much about accessibility as civic ambiance and add much to the concrete and glass urban landscape.

Film Review - The Best Offer - Geoffrey Rush

Geoffrey Rush in The Best Offer

The Best Offer was written and directed by Italian film director, Giuseppe Tornatore, better known for his acclaimed award-winning film Cinema Paradiso. The film follows combined themes of love and deceit, is set in Europe (and filmed in various locations Trieste, Bolzano, Fidenza, Rome, Milan, Merano, Vienna, Prague) and centred on the world of high-end art auctions and antiques. The central character is Virgil Oldman (Geoffrey Rush), an elderly, esteemed, but somewhat eccentric principal of an auction house bearing his name. Oldman operates as both valuer and auctioneer for his clients but his poise, prestige and undoubted expertise is counterpointed by an ongoing bidding scam whereby his friend Billy Whistler (Donald Sutherland) operates as an undisclosed related bidder  in auctions to enable Oldman to acquire a secret private collection of master paintings - for a fraction of their actual value.

 

Virgil is contacted and then hired by a reclusive young heiress, Claire Ibbetson (Sylvia Hoeks), to value and auction off the large collection of art and antiques left to her by her deceased parents. Claire consistently refuses to be seen in person but communicates only by phone and often fails to appear even when agreed with the auctioneer. Oldman also has another associate being a young artificer and 'fixer', Robert (Jim Sturgess), who aids him by restoring objects and devices he acquires by whatever means. A particular project involves reassembling a robotic device Virgil carefully acquires piece-by-piece from Claire's property. Virgil also seeks Robert's advice on how to befriend her, and how to deal with his evolving feelings towards her.

 

The film has a number of cliches but the storyline does provide the ultimate twist when the scam or 'sting' is revealed. A few clues are given so the audience is able to deduce that all is not as it seems.  It is the performance of Geoffrey Rush however which forms the foundation and strength of the plot line and ultimately the entire film.



Climate Change Insight: How the Earth's tilt is affected

As most high school students would know (and the rest of us remember), the Earth spins, or more accurately, it wobbles on an axis which in turn causes the magnetic poles to shift slowly. The Earth's rotational axis and its rate of spin are influenced by the fact that the planet is not a perfect sphere but rather has a changing surface caused by plate tectonics, movement of mass such as oceans due to the weather and erosion of solid structures. The drift has generally been around 6 centimetres a year with the poles moving in a constant direction however in 2005 this suddenly both changed and accelerated. The drift switch was a surprise and researchers at the University of Texas using the GRACE satellites (or Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment) have found the answer. 

Warming temperatures have led to an extraordinary loss of mass in glaciers in Greenland, Antarctica and large mountain ranges in the order of 600 gigatonnes a year. The redistribution of water from ice surfaces to the oceans accounts for almost the entire change in the Earth's polar tilt since 2005 and its acceleration.

Climate Change Insight: The IPCC and the Assessment Reports - Based on fact rather than fiction.

Recent media reports have been speculating that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is likely to backtrack on the level of global warming which has occured and instead state that global warming has only been around  half  of the level presented in its' previous reports. This odd media speculation has already been found to be based on various false and misleading statements without evidence nor facts. Correspondingly the IPCC is about to release the first stage of its' Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) with the other parts to be delivered progressively over 2013–2014.

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases one of its major reports, it’s an assessment that collects and summarises current knowledge regarding climate change. This is undertaken using peer reviewed literature and unreviewed (grey) sources of science data. The reports from the IPCC are considered to be the leading review globally of climate change and are drafted and reviewed literally by a team of hundreds of scientists and specialists from a diverse range of disciplines.

The IPCC itself is organised into three Working Groups and a Taskforce.  Working Group I covers “The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change”, Working Group II addresses “Climate Change Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”, and Working Group III deals with “Mitigation of Climate Change”. The Task Force refines the methodology for the calculation and reporting of national greenhouse gas emissions and reductions. All these groups have two co-chairs, one from a developed country and one from a developing country.

To given an idea of the scale of involvement from the worldwide science communtiy, the First Order Draft of Working Group I for the forthcoming AR5 report for example received 21,400 comments from 659 experts. The AR5’s Second Order Draft for Working Group I received 31,422 comments from about 800 experts and 26 governments.

 

The timeline for the three key areas examined in the AR5 are:

• the physical science – Working Group I (September 2013)
• impacts, vulnerabilities and adaptation – Working Group II (March 2014)
• mitigation options scenarios – Working Group III (April 2014) 

A final synthesis report to be released in October 2014, will provide an overview of all of these three areas.

Fim Review - Blue Jasmine - Woody Allen

Cate Blanchett in the closing scene of Blue Jasmine

Woody Allen's latest film creation, as both writer and director, is both dramatically impressive if not also a tad depressing with its' focus on denial, self-absorption and desperation within relationships. Cate Blanchett is cast in the lead role of Jasmine French seemingly a socialite from New York who has been forced to live with her sister, Ginger (Sally Hawkins) and her two boys in San Francisco following the arrest, jailing and suicide of her husband (Alec Baldwin) for corporate fraud. Blanchett's character is an alcohol-dependent, Xanax reliant woman who finds it difficult to accept her changed circumstances and conveys her dissatisfaction of her own and her sister's lives at almost any given moment. All men are seen as 'losers' and Jasmine is desperate to find a new way to make herself substantial again whilst bemoaning the fact she never finished her college degree. The storyline for the film is reputed to pay homage in basic structure to Tennessee Williams' play ' A Streetcar Named Desire' and Allen has drawn in many other themes such as the excesses of the financial markets, a Bernie Madoff/Gordon Gekko character and the impact of larger financial crises on ordinary people.

As with many Allen films, Blue Jasmine has little time for men - they are portrayed as shallow, deceitful, philandering and needful of marriage with a woman to validate their existence. Whilst this observational perspective has a veneer of truth, Allen's own complex personal life would equally draw just as critical a view and indeed has Allen's own life really imitated his art ?

Executive Remuneration: Should directors have a stake in the company ?

One of the much vexed questions which arises with Executive remuneration particularly with Chief Executives, Board Chairs and Directors is how much of a stake in terms of shares/equity should these people hold in the companies which they govern ?  This is particularly relevant for underperforming companies where directors receive high fees but own little or no shares. This becomes all too transparent when a corporation undertakes risky debt financed acquisitions or material business changes which leave shareholders with less value, but directors are unaffected as they have no shares which can be affected. In contrast, engineering company UGL actually issues shares to directors which make up 30% of their fees. The Chair of the Board of Coca-Cola Amatil owns shares in his company worth 11 times his directors fee yet the Board Chair of Spark Infrastructure paid a fee of $245K in 2012 has no shares in that company.

The Australian Shareholders Association undertook research on the issue of shareholdings and gathered data on the 64 independent non-executive chairs of Boards in Australia's top 100 companies. A snapshot of some of the information is below and shows the numbers of share owned, their market value and the level of director's fee paid to the Chairs. Clearly some chairs have little stake in their companies whilst others have committed sizeable amounts of investment.

 

Company	Shares owned	$ Value	Latest $ fee
Spark Infrastructure	0	0	$ 245,000
Fairfax Media	99,206	$   48,611	$ 432,730
Westpac	16,039	$ 449,092	$ 677,464
Woodside Petroleum	20,000	$ 700,200	$ 751,771
Adelaide Brighton	4,739	$   15,638	$ 269,178
Telstra	140,000	$ 653,800	$ 684,441
Perpetual	2,431	$   84,477	$ 484,275
Tabcorp	34,292	$ 102,535	$ 449,625
ASX Ltd	3,825	$ 127,181	$ 326,694
Aust Found Invest Co	2,444,439	$13,077,525	$ 150,000

Negative effects of wind turbine farms: where is the evidence ?

The question of possible negative health effects of winds farms when located near human habitation has been consistently promoted by a small if vocal group. The evidence however is scarce to non-existent and documentary film maker, Neil Barrett shows in this short film that many landholder hosts support wind farms.

Forests and Weather: Can't see the clouds for the trees ?

Environmental scientists have been able to correlate rainfall and temperature patterns with large forest growth for many years however the exact role of forests in the regulation of temperature as well as with the formation of water molecules remains a matter of conjecture. One proposition, of several possible theories, which has garnered strong support  originates from the University of Helsinki and formulates a possible feedback loop exists from trees to aerosol particles. Many plants produce a group of chemicals termed 'Terpenes'. Terpenes are familiar to most people as the smell of pine forests and are the main constituents of turpentine. As terpene molecules are highly volatile the process of oxidisation is theorised to make them less volatile leading to condensation into aerosol particles which have a cooling effect. If this is the case, then the steady deforestation of the planet, through logging/land clearing, weather patterns and outbreaks of disease in trees portents another negative impact on planetary-wide temperature and rainfall patterns. 

Executive Remuneration - pay for performance, the myth and the reality

With the Annual General Meeting season well underway in Australia, the issue of Chief Executive and senior executive remuneration again comes into the spotlight for individual shareholders and institutional investors alike. Despite constant statements from remuneration advisers and optimistic sounds from boards, the reality is that paying the CEO more and providing extraordinary pay packages does not have any relationship to financial results for shareholders.

Investment bank, CLSA examined the executive pay of Australia's top 200 companies plotting their pay in comparison to shareholder returns. The exercise demonstrated that there was no relationship whatsoever. The only relationship which was revealed was the size of the salary often equalled the size of the company - ie big companies paid more but it made no difference to their performance. So where does this leave investors including those who have these 200 top companies in their superannuation accounts ? Certainly the need to exert greater upwards pressure on performance and downwards leverage on disproportionately generous remuneration has never seemed more justified.

Climate Change Insight: Impact of cooler oceans is only temporary

Researchers at UCLA in San Diego in the United States have just released research that shows that the cooling of eastern Pacific Ocean waters has been counteracting the warming effect of greenhouse gases. The impact from this natural variability in ocean cycles is responsible for the pause or “hiatus” in global warming over the last ten years. This is not a permanent effect and will end leading to a resumption in global warming as before.

The UCLA  study examines the tropical Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a climate cycle that occurs over the course of several decades. Within this large pattern are the El Niño and La Niña  cycles that cause shifts in the distribution of warm water in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. While El Niño and La Niña last only a few years, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation lasts several decades. The Oscillation has been in a cooling phase since 1998.

When the climate cycle that governs that ocean cooling reverses and begins warming again, the planet-wide direction toward higher temperatures will resume.

As the researchers have noted, before 2000, global temperatures had risen at a rate of 0.13C per decade since 1950. The hiatus in warming has happened while levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, continue rising steadily. In May 2013, carbon dioxide reached 400 parts per million in the atmosphere for the first time in human history. This study does not refute climate change models, but only reinforces the understanding of the various dynamic forces at work in the environment.