The Guardian

Caught in an information rip?

January 12, 2011
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Being interconnected and tapped into the global flow of data has its risks. Personal risks, global risks, fundamental challenges like the mass extinction of Australia’s biodiversity. But there’s also the very real chance of good – the ability to understand each other, to have richer, far more fulfilling experiences, to come up with new ideas, to solve some of these big problems. Finding the balance is crucial.

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[Reading #7] Changing cities

December 20, 2010
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It’s clichéd to talk about more people living in cities than not, but it’s a milestone.  The way our cities work is changing too. We used to measure them every handful of years in a census, but increasingly we can keep much closer tabs through real time studies of the flow of people and information. So how does that change things?

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Reading #3

November 21, 2010

Thinking about ideas is all about imagining a future, and that’s something Kristin Alford has lots of experience doing. When I caught up with her for ramen last week in Sydney, we talked through nanotech, climate science, books, data visualisation, Synapse and the Australian Network for Art and Technology (Kristin’s on the board), and the [...]

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Reading #2

November 16, 2010

Graphic designer/computer scientist John Maeda is really a perfect case of someone bridging the art/science divide. President of the Rhode Island School of Design, former research director at the MIT Media Lab, one of the guys behind Second Life. Here’s a great NY Times profile. He’s now on a mission to expand the STEM (science, [...]

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