Cost of Living - Sydney and the world

Jack Dikian

August 2011

Ever since the global financial crises spanning the last 3 or so years we, in Australia, have been to a great extent been insulated – although there are a number of predictors indicating we are not out of the woods just yet.

I wanted to take a look at where we are ranked as liviable cities compared with general cost of living. Five of Australia’s mainland capital cities have been ranked in the top eleven liveable cities in the world and in 2007 it was judged the best in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Quality of Living Survey 2006 from Mercer Human Resource Consulting placed Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane among the top 35 cities in the world in which to live. Which ranked them ahead of London, Paris, Singapore, Tokyo and New York.

The table below provides cost of living figures ranked by the most expensive cities to the least expensive.

These are from Mercer’s Cost of Living and rental accommodation costs comparisons and are derived from a survey conducted in March 2011. March 2011 exchange rates and Mercer’s international basket of goods and services are used as basis measurements.

Mercer is a global leader in human resource consulting, outsourcing and investment service.

Rank 2010	City	Country
1	LUANDA	ANGOLA
2	TOKYO	JAPAN
3	NDJAMENA	CHAD
4	MOSCOW	RUSSIA
5	GENEVA	SWITZERLAND
6	OSAKA	JAPAN
7	LIBREVILLE	GABON
8	ZURICH	SWITZERLAND
8	HONG KONG	HONG KONG
10	COPENHAGEN	DENMARK
11	SINGAPORE	SINGAPORE
11	OSLO	NORWAY
13	VICTORIA	SEYCHELLES
14	SEOUL	SOUTH KOREA
15	MILAN	ITALY
16	BEIJING	CHINA
17	LONDON	UNITED KINGDOM
17	PARIS	FRANCE
19	TEL AVIV	ISRAEL
19	NAGOYA	JAPAN
21	SAO PAULO	BRAZIL
22	BERN	SWITZERLAND
23	NIAMEY	NIGER
24	SYDNEY	AUSTRALIA
25	SHANGHAI	CHINA
26	ROME	ITALY
27	NEW YORK	UNITED STATES
28	VIENNA	AUSTRIA
29	RIO DE JANEIRO	BRAZIL
30	ST. PETERSBURG	RUSSIA
31	HELSINKI	FINLAND
32	DAKAR	SENEGAL
33	BANGUI	CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC
33	MELBOURNE	AUSTRALIA
35	AMSTERDAM	NETHERLANDS
36	BAKU	AZERBAIJAN
37	BRATISLAVA	SLOVAKIA
38	GUANGZHOU	CHINA
38	NOUMEA	NEW CALEDONIA
40	ATHENS	GREECE
40	DOUALA	CAMEROON
42	SHENZHEN	CHINA
42	DUBLIN	IRELAND
44	ISTANBUL	TURKEY
45	ABIDJAN	IVORY COAST
45	HAVANA	CUBA
47	PRAGUE	CZECH REPUBLIC
48	BRAZZAVILLE	CONGO
49	BARCELONA	SPAIN
50	FRANKFURT	GERMANY
50	ABU DHABI	UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

Our Digital Legacy

Jack Dikian

July 2011

I was an early user of the Internet – only back in the dusty computer and physics labs of Sydney University the term Internet wasn’t yet invented. It was all about having UUCP access so that we can jump on the Usenet and look at newsgroups.

Newsgroups contained a great deal of content, albeit mostly of a technical nature and mostly text. Even from back then it occurred to me that much of what we were posting would have a presence, linger on servers distributed all over the world.

We are, after all, the first people in the history of the world to create vast online records of our lives. I say our lives because since the rise of the Internet (some 25 years) and more recent advent of social media (7 years) the internet has become seamlessly integrated with all our experiences, and more and more of our everyday life is being documented online.

For example, a quick look at Facebook’s stats tells us there are more than 750 million active users, 50% of them log on to Facebook in any given day and have 130 friends on average. Our lives, relationships, thoughts and opinions will surely fascinate future historians, sociologists, archaeologists and anthropologists studying the dawn of the digital age. The individual worth or contribution might be relatively small, but collectively, as a result of years of Internet activity, this becomes a significant.

At the same time people are beginning to think about their digital legacy. Those digital or virtual assets in the form of photographs, music, blogs, information, and other data that may be typically overlooked in terms of financial or monetary worth. Digital Legacy has been described as ‘the birth of a new industry' as new companies are being created to hold secure encrypted access to digital assets, to be released upon the proof of a users death.

In contrast to the legal, finical and officious aspects of digital legacy I’ve been wondering about what will happen to our Internet presence once we are gone. This is particularly true when we consider the rise of the phenomenon of social networking especially amongst the over 50’s is creating millions of personal archives.

So should someone notify our friends and followers on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other services after our death. Would we want somebody to remove our material from those services, or to leave it there as a memorial? More than a quarter of a million Facebook users will die this year alone.

Importantly, how long will our blogs, tweets and other material remain on the net if nobody removes them? History shows that even the most prominent technology companies can be rapidly overtaken by competitors or deserted by customers. It’s possible that some of our material might disappear along with the demise of our favorite platform. I grew up believing IBM would permeate our personal and professional lives for example.

Twitter

Whislt Twitter’s search only goes back a few days, every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions. So there is a very good chance our tweets will be archived for many many years.