http://www.thepunch.com.au/author-bios/christopher-scanlon/ Christopher Scanlon is a writer and commentator whose writing on a wide range of topics has appeared in major Australian newspapers. He teaches in the journalism program at La Trobe University where he co-founded Upstart, the magazine for emerging journalists, http://www.upstart.net.au/ Between 1999–2007 he co-edited Arena Magazine and continues to manage Arena’s website, http://www.arena.org.au Christopher has a PhD in politics, which focused, among other things, on the political ideas of Mark Latham. Consequently, he can claim the rare distinction of having read and made extensive notes on all of Mr Latham’s books — except The Latham Diaries. Despite escaping from Tasmania in 1996, Christopher still occasionally refers to mainland Australia as ‘The Mainland’ to the appalled amusement of his more cosmopolitan friends. He lives in Melbourne with his wife Kasey Edwards and daughter Violet. en Copyright 2012 The Punch penberthyd@newsltd.com.au penberthyd@newsltd.com.au Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:00:46 +0000 Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:00:46 +0000 Politics, opinion, world news, sports news, latest news, views, Barack Obama, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Nathan Rees, Malcolm Turnbull, Peter Garrett, Barnaby Joyce, Australian, federal politics, opinion polls, election, The Punch, thepunch, punch ExpressionEngine 1.6.7 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 15 http://www.thepunch.com.au/images/punch-logo-rss.png http://www.thepunch.com.au/ 144 70 Politics, political opinion, world news, sports news and the latest news and views updated live, daily on The Punch - Australia's best conversation. Search The Punch keywords http://www.thepunch.com.au/search/ http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/Tough-luck-geeks-were-still-smarter-than-silicon/ For a smart guy, Steve Wozniak — the man who, with Steve Jobs, co-founded Apple — has some pretty dumb ideas. Speaking at a business meeting on the Gold Coast recently, Wozniak claimed that machines are becoming more intelligent than humans. Wozniak was reported to have said ‘We’re already creating the superior beings, I think we lost the battle to the machines long ago. We’re going to become the pets, the dogs of the house.” In Wozniak’s eyes, humans are going to become mere spectators to the doings of machines. ‘Every time we create new technology we’re creating stuff to do the work we used to do and we’re making ourselves less meaningful, less relevant’, he said. feedback@thepunch.com.au (Christopher Scanlon) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/Tough-luck-geeks-were-still-smarter-than-silicon/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/Tough-luck-geeks-were-still-smarter-than-silicon/#item6046 Tue, 14 Jun 2011 18:45:08 +0000 Christopher Scanlon | Author bios | The Punch http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/fresh-from-his-brutal-coup-abbott-bemoans-brutal-labor/ When Julia Gillard successfully challenged Kevin Rudd for the Labor leadership, she brought the noble profession of politics in this country into disrepute. Prior to Gillard’s ascension to the office of PM, politics was a gentlemanly undertaking carried out with a spirit of fair-play. On 24 June 2010, the Gillard coup against Kevin ‘The People’s Prime Minister’ Rudd destroyed this tradition, and sullied the good name of the office of PM.  That, at any rate, has been a core theme running throughout this election campaign. In his closing remarks at the leaders debate, for example, Abbott claimed that ‘decisions will be made by Cabinet, not powerbrokers’, implying that Gillard was somehow beholden to shadowy background figures and that he himself is just a free agent. Similarly, Abbott has tried to run the line that the sight of Kevin Rudd on the campaign trail will remind voters of Labor’s ‘political thuggery’. feedback@thepunch.com.au (Christopher Scanlon) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/fresh-from-his-brutal-coup-abbott-bemoans-brutal-labor/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/fresh-from-his-brutal-coup-abbott-bemoans-brutal-labor/#item3802 Sun, 15 Aug 2010 18:50:40 +0000 Christopher Scanlon | Author bios | The Punch http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/10m-yacht-the-perfect-gift-for-the-girl-with-everything/ My daughter Violet celebrated her first birthday last week so naturally we bought her a yacht.  Not just any yacht, either. It’s a 10 metre Sparkman and Stephens 34 kitted out with satellite navigation system, along with a re-furbished galley and bathroom that wouldn’t look out of place in a modern city apartment. To top it all, we had it painted pink. There’s also an on-board computer so she can document the around the world solo voyage that she’ll be embarking on in 6 months time. (She would have gone immediately, but we figured she’d get her sea legs more quickly if she could stand unaided.) feedback@thepunch.com.au (Christopher Scanlon) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/10m-yacht-the-perfect-gift-for-the-girl-with-everything/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/10m-yacht-the-perfect-gift-for-the-girl-with-everything/#item3683 Sun, 01 Aug 2010 18:45:07 +0000 Christopher Scanlon | Author bios | The Punch http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/telcos-the-australias-torture-chamber/ We don’t torture people in this country. Instead we allow large telecommunications providers to roam the malls and high streets where they sign people up to what are euphemistically called ‘service contracts’.  These service contracts entitle the telco to subject those same people to cruel and unusual treatment designed to disorient them, make them doubt their senses and generally elicit feelings of such helplessness that people begin to identify with the telco and renew their contract. I speak from experience. Last month, my wife’s BlackBerry went bung so I returned it to an Optus store. Despite having a large ‘Optus Yes’ sign out the front, the message from the staff inside was ‘Optus No’. feedback@thepunch.com.au (Christopher Scanlon) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/telcos-the-australias-torture-chamber/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/telcos-the-australias-torture-chamber/#item3457 Thu, 01 Jul 2010 18:30:04 +0000 Christopher Scanlon | Author bios | The Punch http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/Deveny-Kyle-Matty-Johns-and-TTs-rank-hypocrisy/ The response to The Age’s decision to sack Catherine Deveny says a lot about the Australian media and Australian media audiences. In particular, it shows how selective both can be depending on whether they like or dislike the person — and whether it’s a man or woman at the centre of a scandal. Soon after Deveny’s sacking was announced, some of her supporters in the Twittersphere claimed that she had been a victim of censorship. It makes Deveny seem heroic, but it’s hard to see this as censorship.In the first place, Deveny wasn’t prevented by The Age from expressing herself. On this occasion at least, they didn’t spike her writings. feedback@thepunch.com.au (Christopher Scanlon) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/Deveny-Kyle-Matty-Johns-and-TTs-rank-hypocrisy/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/Deveny-Kyle-Matty-Johns-and-TTs-rank-hypocrisy/#item2982 Wed, 05 May 2010 18:50:15 +0000 Christopher Scanlon | Author bios | The Punch http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/politicians-could-experiment-with-just-telling-the-truth/ Gordon Brown made not one, but two public gaffes in his exchange with Gillian Duffy. The first was to be caught describing the pensioner as a bigot in the first place. A politician as experienced as Gordon Brown should know better than to forget that he was wired. Brown’s second gaffe was to spend 40 minutes apologising to the pensioner after his words were played back to him during a radio interview. No doubt his media minders regarded this as a necessary piece of damage control, a last-ditch effort to contain an already disastrous situation. That might have been the intent, but the apology just left him looking meal-mouthed, amateurish and weak. The better option — and the thing that a true politician would have done — would have been to own up to his words and defend his beliefs.  feedback@thepunch.com.au (Christopher Scanlon) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/politicians-could-experiment-with-just-telling-the-truth/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/politicians-could-experiment-with-just-telling-the-truth/#item2986 Mon, 03 May 2010 18:50:57 +0000 Christopher Scanlon | Author bios | The Punch http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/what-a-concept-car-can-tell-you-about-life-in-the-future/ I have glimpsed the future of motoring and it turns out that in twenty years from now we’ll all be zipping around in ludicrously over-accessorised Segways. At least that’s if General Motors has any say in the matter. GM’s new ‘Electric Networked Vehicle’, or EN-V,  which was recently shown to the motoring public in Shanghai, looks like a Segway on steroids, which is not all that surprising given that it was developed in partnership with Segway. Weighing in at less than 500 kilograms, measuring just 1.5 metres long and powered entirely by electricity, the EN-V is being touted as a solution to pollution, urban congestion and road accidents. feedback@thepunch.com.au (Christopher Scanlon) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/what-a-concept-car-can-tell-you-about-life-in-the-future/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/what-a-concept-car-can-tell-you-about-life-in-the-future/#item2901 Wed, 21 Apr 2010 18:40:49 +0000 Christopher Scanlon | Author bios | The Punch http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/a-message-to-the-selfish-children-are-a-public-good/ The arrival of a newborn child does strange things to people. It warps their perspective and clouds their judgement — and that’s to say nothing of sleep-deprived new parents. Instead, it’s a conclusion I’ve reached by reading commentators and readers of opinion websites. Take, for example, Carrie Miller’s offering in yesterday’s edition of The Punch. While Miller had a point about overbearing middle-class parents, she sounded like a child who needs a spell on the naughty step by likening child-bearing to ‘a banal biological tradition driven by the baser instincts inherent in animals’.  Miller isn’t alone in reducing childbearing to nothing more than ‘biological tradition’. Over at Fairfax’s competitor to The Punch, the National Times, recent articles about the behaviour of harried parents and their prams provoked comments from readers arguing that children are nothing than a lifestyle choice. feedback@thepunch.com.au (Christopher Scanlon) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/a-message-to-the-selfish-children-are-a-public-good/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/a-message-to-the-selfish-children-are-a-public-good/#item2401 Mon, 15 Feb 2010 18:50:39 +0000 Christopher Scanlon | Author bios | The Punch http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/in-praise-of-dan-brown/ ‘Do not start me on The Da Vinci Code. A novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name’. That’s how Salman Rushdie described Dan Brown’s 2003 blockbuster in an interview with the Lawrence Journal-World in 2005. Rushdie isn’t alone in his unflattering assessment of Dan Brown’s writing. More recently, professor of linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, Geoffrey Pullum told the Daily Telegraph that ‘Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad’. And Pullum isn’t just being a high-minded literary snob, either; the professor has a point. To illustrate his case, Pullum cites a passage from Angels and Demons in which the lead female character hears about the death of her scientist father. ‘Genius, she thought. My father . . . Dad. Dead’ writes Brown. feedback@thepunch.com.au (Christopher Scanlon) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/in-praise-of-dan-brown/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/in-praise-of-dan-brown/#item1391 Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:20:00 +0000 Christopher Scanlon | Author bios | The Punch http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/the-complete-world-history-of-binge-drinking/ With the current kerfuffle about binge drinking, you might be inclined to think that drinking copious amounts of alcohol is a fairly recent phenomenon. The truth is that the history of Western civilisation is soaked in alcohol.  In the spirit of informing the current debate — and helping policy makers and public health officials to see what they’re up against — The Punch presents the following comprehensive* history, spanning over 2500 years of drunkeness. 360 BC — Plato. The history of binge drinking in the West begins in Ancient Greece with the philosopher Plato who compared drinking parties to going to the gym. Just as going to the gym temporarily weakens you but makes you stronger in the long-run, drinking parties, he argued, can make you stronger. feedback@thepunch.com.au (Christopher Scanlon) Article http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/the-complete-world-history-of-binge-drinking/#comments http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/the-complete-world-history-of-binge-drinking/#item1062 Sun, 30 Aug 2009 18:40:46 +0000 Christopher Scanlon | Author bios | The Punch