engineering

Back in September, 2006, we were talking illegal immigrants and artisanal shipbuilding in West Africa, over at the Fistful. one of the curious economic details you could notice was how the process was in fact exhibiting an increasing returns type feature, in that the increased demand for boats increasingly meant that a number of would-be…

Read More a question

John Quiggin blogs about his zombie economics book, specifically the chapter on the efficient market hypothesis. This can be summarised as the doctrine that the current price of a security contains all the publicly available information about it. There is a debate about the degree of predictive power this has and the scope of its…

Read More picking a curve

Brilliant post from Dan Lockton on the design problems of making smart meters usable and useful. In a sense, it relates to this post at the RSA’s Social Brain about “the dark side of “nudge””; of course, the downside of all these neat ideas about adjusting people’s decision processes into ones that are more rational,…

Read More tatty

Remember cows with blogs? Sure ya do. This week I was talking M2M technology again, but with people who are way more hardcore about it than Scottish farmers wanting to give their cows RSS feeds, or even wind turbine engineers wanting to monitor the state of their bearings and power-control electronics. Putting control logic on…

Read More IP over Mud

Very experienced soldiers don’t like robots. I suppose you could ascribe this to conservatism, but then, the last eight years have been a global crash course in how people who tell you that this war will be different to what the old sergeants think are wrong. Meanwhile, at Canon’s main factory in Japan, the workers…

Read More here, robot!