The last post was about what happens to technologies that challenge the “Leviathan” - of hierarchy, class, habit and the external and internal oppositions. It's worth a read, and I can say that because there are big slabs of quotations from two brilliant articles (about the 1970s industrial-policy-from-below Lucas Plan, and the present problems of... Continue Reading →
TLDR: It's a dilemma that has never gotten old. How do you overthrow an ossified system of control without becoming that same thing? “Met the new boss,” and all that. Or, worse and more likely, you run out of steam, lose heart, your best ideas get “borrowed” and prop up the thing you were trying... Continue Reading →
Seems about right to me. The topic of having professional ethics for scientists isn't new. Here is a list of principles proposed by the then chief scientific adviser in the UK, Professor Sir David King - in 2007: Act with skill and care, keep skills up to date Prevent corrupt practice and declare conflicts of... Continue Reading →
Innovation is double plus good? Well, depends... The oil giant Shell is building a new ship, the BBC reports. Half-way through the story, after manfully capturing the scale of this big boy (it's the biggest ship EVER. Over 400m long) we get, as they say in Hollywood, the “reveal.” It's going to be the FNG... Continue Reading →
"Whenever I thought about writing, I would think of climbing a huge mountain or drowning in a sea of literature. Pat says we should think about the literature review as more of a creative challenge. A much more useful analogy for the literature review is trying to get an octopus into a jar. When you think... Continue Reading →
Book Review: Rowlands, I. (1995) The politics of global atmospheric change Manchester: Manchester University Press This is one for the geeks only. If you’re interested in the vicious fights in the 1980s an early 1990s about whether and how “we” would do something about ozone depletion and carbon dioxide build-up, then grab with both ands;... Continue Reading →
Meditation and the Art of Writing. Yep. Should do that. I need my jedi mind tricks The Great Climate Change Denial Industry by Robert M Thorson Those Koch boys getting their money's worth; Leiserowitz proved this with an interesting turnaround regarding the public's first thoughts about climate change after being prompted. In 2007, only 7... Continue Reading →
Here's what the excellent books by Guy Pearse and Clive Hamilton about the Australian government's climate policy under John Howard miss(1); during the premiership of Paul Keating, much loved for his views on Aboriginal reconciliation, Labor was also a "blocker" on climate change, both domestically and internationally. The reason is pretty simple. It's four letters.... Continue Reading →
Gonna see if insta-commenting helps me retain factoids post-reading-on-the-stepper... Finished off "Emerging challenges for science, technology and innovation policy research: a reflexive overview" (Research Policy 38,: 571-582. Brain stretching stuff – this, among others, was gold - "For example, Weick (1995) recounts a story told by the Hungarian Nobel Laureate, Albert Szent-Gyorti, about a small... Continue Reading →
We miss animals. We don't hang around with them so much any more (1). George Monbiot has written with his customary brilliant synthesis of fact and theory about the costs of this. So, on the stepper at the gym this morning, halfway through an excellent article called “Increasing Returns, Path Dependence and the Study of... Continue Reading →
