Not long ago, staying in Cornwall entailed giving up on most modern forms of communication. This summer, the house we have rented there for the last few years had sprouted broadband. Not very fast broadband, admittedly, but a big improvement on no broadband at all- and it’s just there, no fuss, no charge. Back inRead… Read more »
Anthony King and Ivor Crewe were on great form today at the RSA where they did a splendid double act in support of their new book, The Blunders of Government. I plan to write a fuller review to go alongside my post on Conundrum earlier this week, but that will have to wait until IRead… Read more »
In 1999, I wrote a paper with the zeal of the converted, about how online shopping was going to kill supermarkets. It wasn’t that I thought everybody would abandon them, it was that I thought most of the profitable customers would, leaving the supermarkets with high fixed costs and unsustainably low margins. In 2009, IRead… Read more »
I expected to dislike Conundrum. A book written by a member of the Public Accounts Committee (Richard Bacon) and a journalist (Christopher Hope) starting with a series of case studies about some of the worst examples it has examined in recent years was surely guaranteed to be an exercise in the simplistic mandarin bashing whichRead… Read more »
The thing about trust is that it doesn’t emerge, full grown, from the beginning. It grows and it feeds off failure. People learn how to trust not because there are guidelines but because they interact with other people and do it better each time. Martin Stewart-Weeks Original post
The demand for bad products can be inelastic with respect to failure. Chris Dillow Original post
The future is not out there like some foggy day, pre-existing and waiting to be revealed once the mist lifts. Instead, I now like to thing of it more as a lump of clay – it has the potential of being fashioned into a fine sculpture but, equally, it could end up an unstructured mess.Read… Read more »
No one ever wants backups, but everyone always wants restores Bruce Schneier Original post
Good interface design isn’t about making the interface invisible. It’s about integrating it so it’s obvious. Andrew Curry Original post
Most of the time, the hottest place in the solar system is the core of the sun. Some of the time, the hottest place in the solar system is tucked away in an obscure building on an anonymous industrial estate on a former airfield in rural Oxfordshire.1 There they use extreme heat and power toRead… Read more »