June 2012

An unexpectedly scary experience. I had to give a presentation at Telco 2.0’s conference this week, the first time I’ve done this, and the first time I did it at all since OpenTech 2008 (audio, slides). This, quite unexpectedly, flipped me into hellish stage fright, which I had always assumed to be basically a load…

Read More Scared.

Here’s a fascinating post on the Conservative Home Tory Diary from one Paul Goodman, complaining about the fact that No.10 Permanent Secretary Jeremy Heywood wants to have ministerial special advisers brought into civil service line management. The Awesome Whitehall Blog not yet existing, I’ll explain that a special adviser is a political appointee picked by…

Read More A little more on the Project 2.0 and beyond

A couple of other Murdoch/Leveson things. Something to thank Rebekah Brooks for: it seems we were spared John Reid as Prime Minister because he gave an exclusive interview to the Sunday Torygraph before speaking to the News of the Screws, and Becky Asbo decided to zap him out of, basically, pique. I remember actively planning…

Read More Leveson links

Adam Bienkov has an excellent piece out on Guto Harri, Boris Johnson, and the Murdochs. Harri was one of the alternative candidates to Andy Coulson for the No.10 press job, of course, then he worked for Johnson, and now he’s off to work for Murdoch. Bienkov points out that there is an increasing tendency for…

Read More The Project 3.0 – where are we going from here?

Spencer Ackerman is depressed about the response to this piece about the MIT Fab Lab team in Jalalabad with their 3D printing of WLAN extended range antennas. Now the funding’s been cut off and the satellite backhaul is going to go down. Well, more to the point, there never was any funding, and the whole…

Read More depressing

Stafford Beer famously said that the purpose of a system is what it does, the POSIWID principle. Here’s an example of it (if you want some more, try my Politics of the Call Centre series). It’s fairly common for atheists to express amazement at the idea that anyone would expect religious people, especially Catholics, to…

Read More Applying POSIWID