Aphorism 56
This is the futurist’s dilemma: Any believable prediction will be wrong. Any correct prediction will be unbelievable. Either way, a futurist can’t win. He is either dismissed or wrong. Kevin Kelly Original post
Posts By Stefan Czerniawski
Cleaning up the user interface
My dishwasher has a bit of whatever the white goods equivalent is of bling. It has a display panel on the front conveying mostly irrelevant information fairly inefficiently. I assume it is intended to communicate whizzy modernity; it certainly doesn’t communicate much useful information. It cycles through three screens in, only one of which tellsRead… Read more »
Game over
Some evenings on my way home from work, I play a small private game of chicken. Now I have played it for the last time. If there are too many people at the bus stop – and no, I don’t know how many makes too many – that’s a sign that the gap between busesRead… Read more »
Aphorism 55
Archimedes had taken baths before. Quoted by Alistair Croll Original post
Interesting elsewhere – 19 August 2011
Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web USENIX 2011 Keynote: Network Security in the Medium Term, 2061-2561 AD – Charlie’s Diary It’s nearly impossible to underestimate the political significance of information security on the internet of the future. Rather than our credentials and secrets being at risk – our credit card accounts andRead… Read more »
Transparent government
I have read three blog posts in the last few days which together strike me as indicators of a welcome trend. The first two were both from the new Government Digital Service blog, the first from Mike Bracken on his first few weeks in government as Director of Digital. It’s a very upbeat assessment, butRead… Read more »
Petitioning the elephant
A new e-petitions site for government was launched yesterday. It is clean, simple and elegant, with clear government branding consistent with other cross-government sites. So far so good. But managing a cross government service is a tricky business, for reasons I have explored before. Government is a veneer that sits above departments, and like anyRead… Read more »
Aphorism 54
Nudge is not enough to change behaviour on its own. Sometimes you need to bribe and threaten people too. Flip Chart Fairy Tales (introducing his blog post, Nudge is not enough on its own) Original post
Interesting elsewhere – 5 July 2011
Things which caught my eye elsewhere on the web Adrian Short » Blog Archive » Designing with the Delete key Getting rid of all the clutter on your website doesn’t require a great deal of design insight or technical skill. But it needs a lot of discipline. So once a day just delete something thatRead… Read more »
More than usually interesting elsewhere – 23 June 2011
The publication of this post was delayed by the FBI. Not a sentence I ever thought to find myself writing, but these posts are generated from Pinboard bookmarks and the Pinboard server was accidentally impounded by the FBI when they were apparently looking for something else. The cloud is a curious place, where sometimes itRead… Read more »