Category Archives Culture

Resisting our slide in to stupidity... An outstanding discussion worthy of your time and attention. In this episode of the Waking Up podcast from early July this year,  Sam Harris talks to biologist David Krakauer about information, complex systems, and the future of humanity. Information, Complexity,Intelligence M cubed Mayhem...

The Lowy Institute Interpreter has highlighted a new video from Vox giving a simple, quick and easy breakdown of Iran's government and upcoming parliamentary elections that will be held on 26 February. They say: Often Western media portrays Iran as just another top-down dictatorship with 'no politics to speak of', but there is real ideological 'tussle' within the Islamic Republic and its complex institutions. Iran…

The Future of History An excellent interview by @onthemedia with Vint Cerf @vgcerf . The challenge of storing, archiving and retrieving data over time is not new. This challenges every individual with their tens of thousands of family "snaps", every small business with their electronic accounts and customer databases and certainly every organisation and government producing "oceans" perhaps "galaxies" of data, content…

Wilfred Owen

Now, more than ever, Education. So many emotions surround the senseless and barbaric acts that occurred in Paris this week. The tragic loss of life is simply unforgivable. There appears no defence against those secured in their delusional certainty by theocracy. As talk of further conflict escalates, one further example of the collateral [and more subtle] damage is closer to…

iPhone 2007

The nature of true innovation is such that any unique activity is at once, both ignored as irrelevant and recognised [by some] as the future... The difficult part is knowing which one... We know what we are, but know not what we may be. William Shakespeare Given current policy debates regarding "industries of the future" and the need to be "agile"…

In the week that we noted the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, I can't say I ever imagined I would find myself combining the thoughts of Papa Francesco [the Catholic Pope] in his second encyclical letter [LAUDATO SI’] and the assessment of "Mordy Pressing" - Australian Immigration Policy Interpreter and his views on the new sliding scale of ethics. Yet here…

Two variations-on-a-theme: The first comes from our own Clarke & Dawe. Corey Doctorow reminded me of this earlier in the week. The debt crisis in 2010 https://youtu.be/I5QwKEwo4Bc   The second comes from US Senator Elizabeth Warren [ @SenWarren ] speaking at the Re/code conference this past Tuesday.  During a question and answer session, a voter asked why politicians aren't building infrastructure or implementing other policy that…

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