LewsTheri's

The 2006-2007 Ashes Series have officially started today with the First Test currently being held in the Brisbane Cricket Ground. This is one of the oldest and most pretigious international cricket tournament in the world and it has been played between England and Australia since 1882.

I am not a fanatic of cricket but I do know the rules and news of cricket.

The current Ashes tournament is held in Australia this year over a series of 5 Tests, and each Test is played over a number of days, usually 5. The country that wins the most Tests will be the winner of the tournament and be awarded a larger replica of the century-old Ashes Urn because the original urn is very delicate, fragile and permanently kept in the Marylebone Cricket Club in England. If both countries draw, the previous winner will retain the honour and right to hold the Ashes. The Ashes tournament is played in each country alternatively.

Some more interesting historical facts about the Ashes from Wikipedia .....
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The Ashes is a Test cricket series, played between England and Australia - it is international cricket's oldest and most celebrated rivalry dating back to 1882. It is currently played approximately biennially, alternately in England and Australia. The Ashes are held by the country which last won a series and to regain them the other country must win more Test matches in a series than the country that holds them. If a series is drawn then the country holding the Ashes retains them. The last Ashes series was played in England in 2005 when England regained The Ashes after a gap of 16 years by winning the series 2-1. The next Ashes series will be in Australia in 2006-07 with the first test starting today in Brisbane and the next series in England will be in 2009.

The series is named after a satirical obituary published in The Sporting Times in 1882 following the match at The Oval, in which Australia beat England in England for the first time. The obituary stated that English cricket had died, and the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia. The English media dubbed the next English tour, to Australia (1882-83) as the quest to regain The Ashes.

A small terracotta urn was presented to the England captain Ivo Bligh by a group of Melbourne women at some point during the 1882-83 tour. The contents of the urn are reputed to be the ashes of an item of cricket equipment, possibly a bail, ball or stump. The urn is not used as a trophy for the Ashes series, and whichever side holds the Ashes, the urn normally remains in the MCC Museum at Lord's because of its age and fragility.[1] Since the 1998-99 Ashes series, a Waterford crystal trophy has been presented to the winners.

The first Test match between England and Australia had been played in 1877, but the Ashes legend dates back only to their ninth Test match, played in 1882.

On the 1882 tour, the Australians played only one Test, at The Oval in London. It was a low-scoring game on a difficult pitch. Australia made only 63 runs in their first innings, and England, led by A N Hornby, took a 38-run lead with a total of 101. In the second innings, Australia made 122, leaving England to score only 85 runs to win. Australian bowler Fred Spofforth refused to give in, declaring, "This thing can be done." He devastated the English batting, taking the final four wickets while conceding only two runs, to leave England a mere seven runs short of victory in one of the closest and most nail-biting finishes in cricket history.

When England's last batsman went in the team needed only 10 runs to win, but the final batsman Ted Peate scored only 2 before being bowled by Boyle. The astonished crowd fell silent, not believing that England could possibly have lost by 7 runs. When what had happened had sunk in, the crowd cheered the Australians.

When Peate returned to the Pavilion he was reprimanded by W G Grace for not allowing his partner at the wicket Charles Studd to get the runs. Despite Studd being one of the best batsman in England, Peate replied, "I had no confidence in Mr Studd, sir, so thought I had better do my best."

The defeat was widely recorded in the English press. In the 31st August edition of a magazine called "Cricket: A Weekly Record of The Game" there appeared a now obscure mock obituary to "English Supremacy in the Cricket Field which expired on the 29th day of August at the Oval". Two days later, September 2, 1882 a second mock obituary, written by Reginald Brooks, appeared in The Sporting Times. This notice read as follows:

"In Affectionate Remembrance of ENGLISH CRICKET, which died at the Oval on 29th AUGUST, 1882, Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances R.I.P.
N.B. — The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia."
The English media fastened on to this notice and dubbed the English tour to Australia of 1882-83 as the quest to regain The Ashes of English Cricket. The underlying metaphor of this naming is problematic, suggesting that English cricket is a sentient being which was killed by Australia, cremated and then somehow went in search of its own remains. The three match series resulted in a 2-1 win to England, notwithstanding a fourth match, won by an Australian XI whose status remains a matter of dispute.

The term "The Ashes" then largely disappears from public use for the next twenty years; certainly, there is no suggestion that this was the accepted name for the series. Then following the successful English tour of 1903-04 the English captain, Pelham Warner published a book called "How We Recovered The Ashes". Even though the legend is not referred to in the text, the title was enough to revive public interest in the legend. The first mention of "The Ashes" in the Wisden Cricketers' Almanack occurs in 1905 and the first Wisden account of the legend was included in the 1922 edition.
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Here is an interesting article...

And The Richest Fictional Character Is...

Yesterday was Aya's birthday. I drove down to Sydney on Friday night to give her a surprise. I think it was worth it because of her genuine surprised and shocked look when she saw me.

For her birthday, I gave her a MoPod as well as iPod socks. See the photos below.




MoPod is one of those new gadgets that lights up when there is a call or message. But other than those effects, the little 'thing' in there actually spins around.



In case you do not know what the iPod socks are, they are the little covers on the ears of Ah Pooh and the short, flabby arms and legs of the black piggy, used as a cover for iPods.

We had dinner last night at Kobe Jones at King Street Wharf in Darling Harbour. It's one of those Japanese Western fusion restaurant franchise. It was quite good actually, except that we ordered too much food. Because it was our first time there, I think perhaps we ordered too many fried stuff.

The first thing that we had was a sushi roll dish named 'Volcano Roll'. It's california roll with a cream based sauce with scallops. That was a good one, highly recommended, and it does look like a volcano.




The next one is a deep fried soft shell crab dish on some fried noodles and potatoes. The presentation was definitely good, so is the crab, but perhaps having too much fried food stops you from enjoying more.




The next one is a large dish of cold noodles with again fried unagi, something like a cold soba dish but the sauce is more of a balsamic vinegar salad dressing. The deep frying probably destroyed the original taste and texture of the unagi (eel) but the noodles is highly recommended. Really good!



The fourth one is strangely named 'Number 1 Special', probably named so because it is at the top of their signature dish list. Each one is about the size of a small tea cup but it's 7 bucks for one. It is actually 'crab salad with avocado wrapped in snapper and baked with KJ's cream sauce'.




The last one is a 'Green Tea Salmon'. It sounds nice but it is not, maybe because we were quite full then and weren't able to appreciate it. But I think the grilled salmon was too salty and the sauce was plain. That dish costs 21 buck!



I will post some more photos of us at the restaurant and the darling harbour view from the restaurant later.... Here they are...

Aya is definitely enjoying herself :P

The videos I've taken during the journey. Notice the flat land and empty canals. This was Lake George, well, used to be anyway four or five years back. It's now just draught-affected grassland.

Here's an interesting article from ninemsn.com.au about what drunk drivers in NT would do to evade the police.

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Drunk drivers can be inventive when attempting to evade police, particularly in the Northern Territory. Some speed off down the Stuart Highway, hoping officers run out of petrol before they do. And others just decide to get out of their car and run. Another man recently climbed into the passenger's seat in an ill-fated bid to convince police the car was actually driving itself.

One young driver has managed to one-up these methods with a bizarre escape after being pulled over for suspected drink driving.

Around midnight last Saturday, Constable Dale Howe and his partner were in their patrol car when they noticed a sedan "swerving" across the road. They pulled the car over and gave the driver a breath test, in which he registered more than .08.

Everything was proceeding normally until a brown one-metre snake suddenly slithered past the car. Constable Howe was stunned by the driver's actions.

"He [the driver] ran across and picked it up."

"He grabbed the head and faced it outwards at me. I thought he was going to throw it at me or something."

After repeated warnings to drop the reptile, Constable Howe told the snake-wielding aggressor he would use capsicum spray to end the stand-off. Not willing to risk enraging the potentially venomous snake, the driver ran off into nearby bush land still holding his recently acquired pet. Constable Howe courageously gave chase, but lost him in the darkness.

Any celebrations by the escapee will be short-lived. He's a teenager well known to police for his visits to the courts. They're extremely confident he'll be caught, and are preparing to charge him with driving under the influence, assault and driving an unregistered car.

For Dale Howe it made an interesting night's work.

"It's a bit bizarre. It's not everyday someone arms themself with a snake," he said.

When police catch up with the teenager, he may want to start thinking about how he'll explain himself in court. A lawyer would no doubt advise him not to follow the example of another young man who appeared before a Darwin magistrate for exceeding the legal limit.

When asked why he drove after drinking, he replied, "Because I'm a dickhead." "That," said the magistrate, "I can't argue with."
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Up in Sydney just for two days for no apparent reason. Well, to see Aya while she studies for her Actuarial Control Cycle Part II paper next Friday, which coincidentally is her birthday. I am currently in her office, doing a bit of work, editting a video on my SMA testbed and experimental results, etc.

Some views from the office ...

From TIME Magazine

Why a Christian in the White House Felt Betrayed
By DAVID KUO

For Republicans who fear that the Foley scandal might keep Evangelicals away from the polls in November, here comes another challenge--in hardcover format. A new memoir by David Kuo, former second-in-command of President Bush's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, has the White House on the defensive with its account of an Administration that mocked Evangelicals in private while using them at election time to bolster its support. In this exclusive adaptation from the book, Kuo writes about how his White House experiences left him disillusioned about the role religion can play in politics.

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I stepped into the Oval Office to find President George W. Bush prowling behind his desk looking for something. "Kuo!" he said without looking up. "Tell me about this meeting."

It was June 2003, and I was deputy director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. The office had opened in the West Wing in 2001 to support the President's campaign promise of $8 billion a year in new funding for both religious and secular charities that helped the poor. That money never materialized, however, and I was increasingly stuck with the task of explaining to religious groups why the White House was so bad at helping them do good. This meeting, with a group of prominent African-American pastors who had supported Bush's plan, promised to be no different.

I began to brief the President on the pastors, recommending that he talk about the administrative reforms we had implemented, and the tax credits we were still fighting for ...

He interrupted. "Forget about all that. Money. All these guys care about is money. They want money. How much money have we given them?"

I never doubted the President's own faith or desire to help those who, like him, had once been lost in a world of alcohol or, unlike him, had struggled with poverty or drugs. Because I shared his faith and his vision of compassionate conservatism, I had been a very good soldier. When members of his senior staff mocked the plan as the "f___ing faith-based initiative," I didn't say a word. When his legislative-affairs team summarily dismissed our attempts to shoehorn our funding into the budget, I smiled and continued trying to work neatly within the system. When I heard staff privately deriding evangelical Christians because they were so easily seduced by White House power, I raised an eyebrow but not a ruckus. Like everyone else in the small faith-based office, I didn't speak too loudly or thunder too much. We were the nice guys.

Today, however, I decided to choose honesty over niceness. Two months earlier, I had been diagnosed with a brain tumor that required intensive surgery and rehabilitation. This was my first meeting with the President and Karl Rove since my return. Something about undergoing brain surgery had made me reflect about whether I had really been doing a public service by pretending that our office had been living up to its commitments.

I glanced over at Karl and turned to look the President in the eye. "Sir, we've given them virtually nothing," I said, "because we have had virtually nothing new to give."

The President had been looking down at some papers about the event, but his head jerked up. "Nothing? What do you mean we've given them nothing?" He glared. "Don't we have new money in programs like the Compassion Fund thing?"

I looked again at Karl. He seemed stunned at what I was saying. "No, sir," I told the President. "In the past two years we've gotten less than $80 million in new grant dollars." The number fell shockingly short of the $8 billion he had vowed to deliver in the first year alone.

The President's staff didn't just bad-mouth the faith-based office behind closed doors. Their political indifference also kept us from getting the funding we needed so badly. No episode captured that more clearly than the 2001 negotiations over the President's $1.7 trillion tax cut. In those final negotiations with the Senate and House, the White House voluntarily dropped a centerpiece of the President's compassion promise: a provision to allow 80% of Americans to get credit for their charitable contributions.

Now the President seemed shocked at the news that the Compassion Fund was a pittance. "What?! What do you mean?" he asked. Karl, still caught off guard, protested. "But what about the other money? You know, the money we've opened up to new charities."

I hated any clash with Karl. Especially now. The morning after my tumor diagnosis, Karl was among the first people to call. "I know what you are going through," he said. "I've spent more days and nights of my life than I can count in a cancer ward." He explained that his wife was a double breast-cancer survivor, encouraged me for the fight ahead, and offered any assistance I needed. Now, less than two months later, I was standing in front of the President exposing an ugly truth that Karl would rather not have discussed: after two years in office, we had actually spent less than 1% of what Bush had promised.

I was also contradicting our office's own spin. In an effort to divert attention from all the money that wasn't being given to faith-based groups, we had come up with the idea of highlighting the amount of money now "available" to faith-based organizations because of particular administrative reforms announced six months earlier. It was one of those wonderful Washington assertions that is simultaneously accurate and deceptive and just confusing enough to defy opposition. On the one hand, we had eliminated some ancient and patently absurd regulations, many of them promulgated under seemingly faith-phobic Democratic Administrations, that discriminated against faith-based groups simply because they might have a religious-sounding name. The Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, for instance, was once denied the chance to apply for a federal grant even though it was an entirely secular organization.

On the other hand, faith-based groups had actually been getting chunks of that money for decades, and the regulations we put in place really didn't tackle the biggest problem facing secular and religious nonprofits. That problem was the general bureaucratic unfriendliness of the Federal Government to small, local organizations--precisely the kind that compassionate conservatives like Bush (and I) thought could do the best job tackling ingrained poverty and hopelessness on the community level. We were supposed to give these small groups their first shot, but without any money, our office was resigned to making mostly symbolic changes.

None of that had stopped the White House from trumpeting the changes as hugely significant and leading religious conservatives to believe they were highly consequential. Christian conservatives trusted President Bush. After two years in the White House, I had come to realize that regardless of where the President's heart lay on the matter, the back-office Republican political machine was able to take Evangelicals for granted--indeed, often viewed them with undisguised contempt--and still get their votes. G.O.P. operatives trusted that Christian conservatives would see the President more as their Pastor in Chief than anything else. Bush had long used the podium as a pulpit, telling voters that above all he was an evangelical Christian who had been saved from his drinking by Jesus and rebuilt his life around his faith. That inspirational story was carried throughout the country by a network of prominent evangelical pastors who had been quietly working since 1998 to recruit thousands of other pastors to join the Bush team. After the election, however, those same pastors became accomplices in their own deception by not demanding that the President's actions in office match their electoral fervor.

This White House is certainly not the first Administration to milk religious groups for votes and then boot them unceremoniously back out to pasture. In his days as a notorious "hatchet man" for President Richard M. Nixon, before he had allowed Jesus to transform his life, Chuck Colson used to oversee outreach to the religious community. "I arranged special briefings in the Roosevelt Room for religious leaders, ushered wide-eyed denominational leaders into the Oval Office for private sessions with the President," Colson later wrote. "Of all the groups I dealt with, I found religious leaders the most naive about politics. Maybe that is because so many come from sheltered backgrounds, or perhaps it is the result of a mistaken perception of the demands of Christian charity ... Or, most worrisome of all, they may simply like to be around power."

I finished the briefing. Yes, I told the President, because of new regulations there was technically about $8 billion in existing funding that was now more accessible to faith-based groups. But, I assured him, those organizations had been getting money from those programs for years and it wasn't that big a deal.

"Eight billion in new dollars?" he asked.

"No, sir. Eight billion in existing dollars where groups will find it technically easier to apply for grants. But faith-based groups have been getting that money for years."

"Eight billion," he said. "That's what we'll tell them. Eight billion in new funds for faith-based groups. O.K., let's go."

We headed out of the Oval Office, down a flight of stairs and over to the Old Executive Office Building, where the pastors awaited us. The President walked into the room, traded a few jokes and told the group that because of the faith-based initiative, billions of dollars in new funds were now available to faith-based groups like theirs. The pastors listened respectfully. Before the President left, they prayed for him.

Karl stayed behind to share some thoughts and answer questions. "Before I get started, I want to say something. This initiative isn't political," he told them. "If I walked into the Oval Office and said it was going to be political, the President would bash my head in."

Then the questions began. "Since the President brought up money, where, exactly is that money?" asked one pastor. "We've talked to the Cabinet Secretaries, and they say there isn't any new money." They peppered him with questions for several minutes. Finally he smiled at them and said, "Tell you what, I'm going to get those guys in a room and bash some heads together and get to the bottom of this. I'll be back in touch with you." He left confidently.

At the meeting's end, several of the pastors said they wanted to pray for my healing. They placed their hands on my shoulder and called on God to hear their prayers on my behalf. I listened and loved it and said a prayer of my own: that I would have the courage to tell them what was really going on at the White House.

That was more than three years ago. Their prayers have worked on my body. I am still here and very much alive. Now I am finding the courage to speak out about God and politics and their dangerous dance. George W. Bush, the man, is a person of profound faith and deep compassion for those who suffer. But President George W. Bush is a politician and is ultimately no different from any other politician, content to use religion for electoral gain more than for good works. Millions of Evangelicals may share Bush's faith, but they would protect themselves--and their interests--better if they looked at him through the same coldly political lens with which he views them.
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Australia in Top Five Most Livable Countries

What does this tell us? The rich are getting richer, and the poor are still neglected.

A news article from ninemsn.com.au
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Norway, Iceland, Australia, Ireland and Sweden rank as the best five countries to live in but Africa's quality of life has plummeted because of AIDS, a UN report shows.

The United States was ranked in eighth place, after Canada and Japan, in the report that rates not only per-capita income but also educational levels, health care and life expectancy in measuring a nation's well-being.

The Human Development Index, prepared by the UN Development Program, has been issued annually since 1990 and includes every country for which statistics are available.

Unsurprisingly, the countries at the top of the list are high income nations as people in richer countries tend to be healthier and have more educational opportunities.

People in Norway, for example, are 40 times wealthier than people in Niger, which ranks 177th, the lowest ranking country on the list.

For the 31 countries with low human development, life expectancy is only 46 years - some 32 years less than in rich nations, the report said.

But some nations have a rank above their income. Vietnam for example is poor but ranks above countries with a higher per capita income.

Conversely Bahrain has an average income twice the level of Chile but ranks lower because it "under-performs on education and literacy," the report said.

However, since 1990, sub-Sahara Africa has stagnated, in part because of economic decline but mainly because of the "catastrophic effect of HIV/AIDS on life expectancy," the report said.

The list of 177 nations ends with Niger. Above it are Sierra Leone, Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea-Bissau, the Central African Republic, Chad, Ethiopia, Burundi, Mozambique and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which ranked 167th.

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I have reached the stage in my research where I should be wrapping up experimental work, tying up loose ends and start to churn results into publications. It's the stage where I say to myself, alright, you've got what you need to get a Ph.D., and it's time to leave the work to somebody else to continue.

It's now time to consolidate the results - make the results understandable to others. That is the hardest part. It's a logical process. But once we've got this figure out, the thesis will follow much more easily.

What we will concentrate on doing now are the following:
- prepare for a department seminar sometime in December this year
- publish in the International Journal of Robotics Research a paper encompassing mainly the results this year from model identification, simulation of control system to verification of experimental results.
- prepare and attend two international conferences, one in Italy next April and the other in China next July

Once the above papers and events have been prepared, I will be concentrating on writing up my thesis. My supervisors recommend allocating 6 months, full-time on writing the thesis from scatch to submision. It may seem like too long but I reckon that's about right. It's technical writing and that requires a lot of planning and thinking. There's always moments when you realise that, perhaps an experiment had not been conducted that is vital to the flow of your reasoning, or an experiment that needs to be re-done, etc. Anything can crop up.

So I am aiming to start on my thesis next February and get it submitted in August 2007. In the mean time, I look forward to less stressful times until the end of the year and a great Christmas vacation, although it doesn't mean that I can neglect my work. Still have a departmental seminar to prepare before Christmas and papers to write up!

The Melbourne Cup - the race that stops a nation - was held today. Melbourne Cup is Australia's major annual thoroughbred horse race. It is generally regarded as the most prestigious "two-mile" handicap in the world.
The 2006 Melbourne Cup race started at 3:00pm AEDT and was won by Delta Blues (horse number 2), just ahead of Pop Rock (horse number 12), with Maybe Better (horse number 23) coming in third place. Both Delta Blues and Pop Rock were Japanese horses trained by Katsuhiko Sumii. Maybe Better was the Australian horse with the highest placing. This is the first time in the race history that a Japanese horse has won the race.

Now for some trivia about the Melbourne Cup:
- It is for three-year-olds and over (we're talking about race horses, not people)
- The race covers a distance of 3200 metres
- The event is held on the first Tuesday in November by the Victoria Racing Club
- It is held on the Flemington Racecourse in Melbourne, which can hold 135,000
- $20 million was expected to change hands just at the track today
- Almost 80% of Australian adults bet on the race
- 800kg of smoked salmon, 2 tonnes of beef, 50,000 sandwiches and 40,000 party pies were ordered at the track
- Punters would have washed the food down with 165,000 cans of beer, 50,000 bottles of sparkling wine and 1,000 bottles of champagne in the members' area

I mentioned that I attended a Departmental Seminar by Prof. Andrew Blakers, the Director of the Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems & ARC Centre of Excellence for Solar Energy Systems here at the ANU last week on their photovoltaics/solar cell invention.

If anyone is interested about this invention and about climate change in general, you may follow the link below. It provides a description of the seminar and also slides from that seminar. Note that there is also a video clip of the entire seminar but it is about 200MB. You may want to download it completely before viewing.

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Here is also another related link about climate change provided by my brother.

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By the way, if you are generally interested in the research done by people from CECS (the College of Engineering and Computer Science) of ANU. Follow this link. It may have slides and even videos from past seminars.

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Today I took a stroll in the new extension of the Canberra Centre. Canberra Centre's the main shopping complex in Civic, the city centre, or more like the 'town centre' of Canberra. Those of you familiar with Canberra will know that there's nothing happening in this quiet capital. Of course there are large shopping malls in the various town centres in Canberra. Other than Canberra Centre in Civic, there's Westfield Woden in the south and Westfield Belconnen in the North West.

Well, I'm not the shopping type, so I went for a walk and was done in like 10 minutes. A lot of the shops on the ground floor are still under renovation. And it was already late so most of the shops are already closed except the supermarket, Superbarn. Well, I noticed that Superbarn, was like 40% larger than its previous location. Bought milk and fruits while I was there.







I like the resting areas of the new mall. Very classy. And the wooden chairs have like a playground for children.



The new section of the mall is still under construction as you can see from the outside. There'll be plenty of new restaurants and cafes as well, and a new huge cinema.





And on a different note, here's my cute little niece!

This is so funny! I used my N93 to record this video straight from the TV when it's being shown just today, Channel Nine's '20 to 1 - Unscripted and Unplanned'

Enjoy!

Today it rained. No. It was a downpour. Strong winds. Plenty of rain. But too little too late. It hasn't rained in Canberra for at least a month, and the last two months have been considered the driest and the hottest September and October for the past ten or twenty years.





Canberra is considered lucky. The worst hit areas are the farm lands in New South Wales. The people involved in the primary industry, especially the farmers and orchard owners, are devastated by draughts which have lasted six years. The government is trying to get the farmers back on their feet by allocating funds and assistance but I guess it's too little, too late. Apparently, the statistics say that one male adult in the primary industry commits suicide every four days.

When there are extreme weather conditions for long period of time, it's a sign that there is something wrong with the environment. The effects of global warming are really taking its toll but no one, not even the government is doing much. It is only these few days or so that we've heard measures being taken and funds being allocated to research into these dire areas.

I went to a seminar the other day given by a solar energy researcher of ANU. Prof. Andrew Blakers is the Director of the Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems & ARC Centre of Excellence for Solar Energy Systems here at the ANU. His group has invented a new solar cell technology which can reduce the cost of solar cells by 3 quarters and has 20% energy efficiency, which is extremely good when we consider that the energy source is the sun. They are currently commercialising the technology and a factory is currently being built in Adelaide which will manufacture these new solar cells.

It's interesting because when he was asked what the best ways for sustainable energy management in the future are, he said 'with diversity comes stability'. What he means is that we should not depend on a single energy source, unlike the current world situation where fossil fuels are the most important source of energy, but have a variety of renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, geothermal and perhaps nuclear. In terms of researching into these technologies, Australia lags behind and there aren't a lot of encouragement and funding into these areas.

One of the richest man in China, Zhengrong Shi, was a researcher in solar technology from the University of New South Wales. The Chinese government saw that the technology has potential and thus invited him back to China to commercialise the technology. He is now worth an estimated $3 billion, making him the wealthiest person in mainland China, 4th in Australian and 350th richest person in the world, according to Forbes.

Although Australia has lost its world lead in developing a solar energy industry, it is not too late to catch up, he says. "But we have to think long-term and in a more creative way. Australia has the best solar technology. And we have got so much sunshine."

And let's hope that we're not too late.

New wondercup undies give men a boost... What has the world come to?



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