Arabica coffee beans are what keep the cafes around Australia churning out $3 coffees, but that coffee could soon come with an extra jolt.

Wholesale coffee prices are higher now than ever before. And while the industry is absorbing the extra cost for now, consumers are being warned of a price shock to come.

Rabobank senior analyst Wayne Gordon says the price of coffee beans has hit a 12-year high on the New York Futures Exchange because of heavy rainfall in Brazil and surrounding countries.

"Of course that's tightened up supply and that's what's given the market that little bit of jump," he said.

With all the excitement surrounding the solar powered UAV's record-breaking flights, we would be remiss if we didn't mention that QinetiQ's Zephyr has finally landed in an airfield in Arizona, 14 days and 24 minutes after take-off. This quadruples the previous unofficial world record for unmanned flight (which it set itself in 2008). This is a dramatic proof-of-concept, having flown longer without refueling than any other airplane. We'd like to imagine that this technology would be used primarily for delivering toys to children in developing nations, but something tells us that will have to wait until the military gets its hands on it. PR after the break.

So I guess if a government feels it doesn't have support on an issue, then there is a case to suggest they don't have support.

Another way to look at it was put by @robcorr on Twitter this morning:

1. Rudd & Turnbull had bipartisan policy. 2. Greens voted with Abbott to do nothing. 3. Public opinion turned. 4. Gillard is rebuilding it.

I can see that too.

Okay, governments should lead and all that, blah, blah, but most people only think that when "government leading" equals doing something they agree with.

Personally, I'd prefer an ETS was passed yesterday, but the government clearly thinks support for that view is soft.

In response to this almost orgasmic level of reassurance, Abbott can offer little, for if Gillard is ill-suited to the savage smear, he is even less-suited to positivity. He has created his own ads, where he sits in a sort of hunched-forward pose, a la a ready-to-pounce mongoose, and informs us that he wants to stand up for real action, while a song about standing up for real action is sung by the Standing Up For Real Action Choir, a group recruited from the Sydney School For The Gifted And Insufferable.

It is his attempt to inspire, but it does not quite achieve its aims, due to a certain lack of finesse in production and the overwhelming impression that Abbott at any moment may attempt to tear your still-beating heart from your chest.

Is Tony Abbott really the kind of man who would amputate your son's legs?

A humorous cartoon:

Leading constitutional lawyer Greg Craven, who is vice chancellor of the Australian Catholic University , told The Australian Online that because Senator Brown had no chance of becoming prime minister, he should not be present in the debates.

“If the debate is about a potential prime minister you may as well have Humphrey Bear there because he'll have as much chance as Bob Brown of being prime minister,” he said.

“So if that's the issue, there's a problem.”

To become prime minister one must lead the party with a majority of seats in the House of Representatives, and be a member of the lower house.

However the Greens do not have a single MP in the House of Representatives.

Dr James Rockey, of Leicester University, analysed the stated values of 136,000 people in a survey carried out in 48 countries, and found that the well-educated were most likely to misplace themselves on the political spectrum.

A tendency was observed among this group to identify as left-wing, and vote accordingly, despite holding views on wealth distribution that placed them further to the right, Dr Rockey reported.

The new rule that the court laid down completely reshapes the political landscape. Until January this year, if companies such as ExxonMobil or Walmart wanted to throw their weight around in federal elections, they could encourage their employees to contribute their own money to a political-action committee, an indirect route that had inherent limits — notably the fact that there is only so much money employees are willing to give to fight their company's political battles.

What can we learn about usability…

THE Liberal Party has appointed an advertising agency that specialises in marketing to women.

It will research key marginal seats as it moves to counter the sudden emergence of Julia Gillard as its electoral foe.

Just shows how desperate the Liberal Party is.

What Is A/B Testing?

At its core, A/B testing is exactly what it sounds like: you have two versions of an element (A and B) and a metric that defines success. To determine which version is better, you subject both versions to experimentation simultaneously. In the end, you measure which version was more successful and select that version for real-world use.

This is similar to the experiments you did in Science 101. Remember the experiment in which you tested various substances to see which supports plant growth and which suppresses it. At different intervals, you measured the growth of plants as they were subjected to different conditions, and in the end you tallied the increase in height of the different plants.

Large version

A/B testing on the Web is similar. You have two designs of a website: A and B. Typically, A is the existing design (called the control), and B is the new design. You split your website traffic between these two versions and measure their performance using metrics that you care about (conversion rate, sales, bounce rate, etc.). In the end, you select the version that performs best.

This smashing magazine guide is an excellet primer on A/B testing.

I've previously written about the value and importance of A/B testing here: http://alexwhite.org/2010/05/use-ab-split-testing-for-your-union-website/

Online maps are a lifesaver when you're navigating an unfamiliar city, an absolute lifeline to the lost or touristy. That's why Microsoft wants to simplify Bing Destination Maps and bring a little aesthetic flair to the service, too

I can't get it to work (perhaps Firefox is the problem). I'd be interested in knowing anyone can get it working - looks really cool.

The 2010 midterm election cycle is in full swing, with right-wing pundits predicting a Congressional turnover just as sweeping as the Gingrich revolution of 1994, while the left is mostly hoping a loss of seats won't damage Obama's presidency as badly as the GOP's triumph did Bill Clinton's. So what should grassroots activists and candidates do? Consultants have made campaigns seem like rocket science, but they aren't. The basic formula is "50 percent + 1 = power," but there are a lot of ways to reach that goal. Malia Lazu, Mel King Community Fellow at MIT, has come up with ten things progressives can do to build a campaign for candidates who deserve to win.

Some genuinely good advice in this article, especially the bit about "making precinct captains [booth captains] sexy again".

When demonstrating innovative concepts in robotics, engineers are inevitably subjected to a good-natured Skynet-ribbing about contributing to the wholesale extinction of the human race. It really doesn't help the scientists' cause, though, when language like "precise aggressive maneuvers" is used to describe an autonomous and intimidating flying object -- particularly one with deadly, twirling blades.

Apparently, the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP lab felt no need to temper its combative language in order to ease the minds of a paranoid public. The group's awesomely autonomous quadrotor helicopter represents the next phase in 'copter evolution, and its demonstration video captures some breathtaking moves. The little guy, which definitely needs a killer moniker, performs a variety of flips, catapults through a window with only 3 inches of clearance on each side, and lands on both vertical and inclined surfaces.

Holymoly! Once they embiggen these micro-Terminator hunt-and-kills, we're all doomed.

Silicon Valley in the Internet age has not made for great presidential photo ops. The Valley's computer-chip factories were off-shored decades ago and (Google accepted) the software giants that supplanted hardware companies just didn't have the same pizzazz -- T-shirted geeks writing code can't compete with guys and gals in bunny suits tending big futuristic machines.

The rise of green tech has changed all that. The Valley is back in the business of building stuff -- solar panels, electric cars, fuel cells, and various energy efficient widgets and gadgets.

And so when President Obama's helicopter landed Wednesday morning at Solyndra, a solar module maker, a television-ready tableau awaited -- a huge American flag hung in an unfinished factory, shiny high-tech thin-film solar panels were on display and workers in hard hats mingled with an audience of some 200 engineers, scientists, venture capitalists, and California's patron saint of green tech PR events, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

President Obama examines a solar panel with Solyndra executives.Photo and caption: The White House

"We've got to go back to making things. We've got to go back to exports. We've got to go back to innovation," said Obama on Wednesday in Fremont as Solyndra employees snapped photos with their iPhones. 

Green-tech can turn around the loss of manufacturing in industrialised countries.

BrightSource Energy, a developer of utility-scale solar thermal power plants that won a $1.37 billion federal loan guarantee this year, has raised $150 million in a fourth-round of equity financing. The massive new investment announced this morning puts it in a growing group of greentech startups that have raised more than $300 million.

NEW YORK—While millions of young, tech-savvy professionals already use services like Facebook and Twitter to keep in constant touch with friends, a new social networking platform called Foursquare has recently taken the oh, fucking hell, can't some other desperate news outlet cover this crap instead?

The Onion is as ever, America's finest news whatever.

The 2010 electorate has swallowed an emetic — disgorging in a series of retching convulsions officeholders in both parties who seem to embody conventional Washington politics.

The anti-establishment, anti-incumbent fevers on display Tuesday are not new. The ideologically charged, grass-roots activists flexing their muscle in this week’s primary showdowns are the same breed as primary voters who four years ago stripped the Democratic nomination away from Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who later won as an independent.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the 2010 US mid-term elections are all about anti-incumbency. The Democrats will lose the most because they have the most incumbents, but it's not an anti-Democrat election. Voters are sick of the Republicans as well.

A new national report shows if governments act now to shift Australia from a pollution dependent economy to a cleaner economy it will create 3.7 million new jobs across the country by 2030.

Creating Jobs - Cutting Pollution: the roadmap for a cleaner, stronger economy, released today by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), is based on the most extensive economic modelling to date of costs and benefits across all Australian regions of taking strong action to cut greenhouse pollution by 25 per cent.

The report shows households will be 10 per cent better off by 2030 with strong policies (a price on pollution plus measures including energy efficiency, renewable energy investment and cleaner transport) but our economy and living standards will suffer if government action is weak.

Click the link to download the report. Now that action on climate change has been delayed by the Liberals and Greens Party (through their vote to block the CPRS), it's important to start work on building a clean energy economy.