Last week in an article in the Financial Review renown businessman David Gonski talked about the commoditisation of the professions. Let’s be professional and fight artificial intelligence. (David Gonski) Gonski is right on a number of fronts, but very wrong on others. He is totally right in that the humans in the workplace need […]
www.braveconversations.org Web Science is becoming increasingly important. As JP Rangaswami writes in one of his recent blog posts We need to get better at studying the impact of change over time. Proper, longitudinal study, collecting and preserving the right data sets, with the relevant discipline and safeguards in place. That’s why I have been fascinated […]
This is the first photo taken of the Earth from space in 1947. It gave humans a new view of their world which Carl Sagan described as a pale blue dot in the Universe. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human […]
Last week Web Science celebrated its tenth birthday. This week the UK’s Government Digital Service celebrated it’s fifth birthday and it’s story of those five years. These two milestones are important for the Web, as both organisations have only just begun the crucial work they were created to do, one creating the Government Social Machine […]
Last week I attended Philanthropy Australia’s 2016 National Conference in Sydney and CEO Sarah Davies opened the conversation with this quote from Victor Frankl. It resonated for me immediately because it highlighted two important elements of philanthropy. Firstly, the potential that lies in the interstice (the space between), where things are ill-defined, and Secondly, the […]
There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen. (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, aka Lenin) I will say at the outset that I had no say in BrExit. I am neither a UK citizen nor resident, but I am a proud member of the British diaspora, and have benefited from being […]
Facebook isn’t a charity. The poor will pay by surrendering their data. In these few words Evgeny Morozov gets to heart of the digital transformation that is currently disrupting all value chains within the world as we know it. We are all now “paying” with our data. Scientifically, information is a choice—a yes-or-no choice. In a […]
Last week in Adelaide and Sydney we launched our Australian Web Observatory which is now a “node” within the global network of Web Observatories. My presentation can be found here, and Ramine Tinati’s overview of SOCIAM and the Web Observatory can be found here. The Australian Web Observatory is hosted at the University of South […]
This week I went to CeBIT, “Australasia’s largest business technology exhibition“. Apart form the fact that I had to schlep all the way out to Homebush, they didn’t have my registration correct, and the organisation was poor, I was seriously underwhelmed. The last time I went to CeBIT was around five years ago and I […]
Yesterday I sat and observed an old man as he waited at a bus stop in London. He stood with his trolley for almost twenty minutes, and watched expectantly, totally focused on his quarry. The right bus just wouldn’t come. Eventually some taxis drove around the corner and he tried to hail one, but none […]
