Thus grew the tale of Taviland: Thus slowly, one by one, Its quaint events were hammered out – And now the tale is done. (Tavistock Lecture Dr Eliat Aram, 2018). The Tavistock Institute was founded in 1947 as an organisation dedicated to the study of human relations for the purpose of bettering working life and […]
Douglas Adams, that doyen of so much wisdom, once said I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that’s invented between […]
Not long ago I was walking over the entrance to Narrabeen Lakes and I saw this fellow swimming against the tide. I had been talking to my friend about getting an endless pool and all of a sudden here was nature’s version. Over the past few posts I have been thinking about the words we […]
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 […]
Thus Tweeted Aron Hausler, one of our core team on the Australian Web Observatory project. Business models are not just being disrupted, they are being totally transformed, and across all sectors. We are only just beginning to come to grips with what this means, but we are doing it very slowly, and I believe that […]
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 […]
Last week I participated in the “Digital Enlightenment Forum” in Kilkenny, Ireland. The Forum believes that “people should enjoy the kinds of autonomy and freedom online that they do offline. The first priority of our mission is to establish and support the position and rights of the individual in relation to the rest of society. […]
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 […]
In the past month I have participated in a number of events which have highlighted the juxtaposition between “remembering” and “forgetting”. And 2014 is a rather important year on both fronts. Firstly, 2014 is the tercentenary of the Longitude Act (1714) when the British Government established a prize to solve the “Longitude Problem”. As a […]
