A Looting the Ivory Tower on Sovacool, B. 2024. The promise and peril of sociotechnical visions of the future. Nature Reviews Physics. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-024-00774-5 Not all academic work is self-serving word-spinning helpfully quarantined behind paywalls and verbiage walls. I wouldn’t want to hazard a percentage, and it varies from a) field to field and b) taste to... Continue Reading →
Help me invent a career-making shoddy little neologism! Something with skeuomorphs
Help me internet, you're my only hope. If I can come up with some neat name for a kinda-new-maybe-"concept", I'll get cited lots by academics, my Hype-index will climb into the positive, and I won't get laughed at in the rare job interviews that I stumble into. The situation is this There are such things... Continue Reading →
Technology and the PEBCAC problem, as elucidated by Lee Child’s “Jack Reacher”
No system, as the adage goes, is fool-proof to a sufficiently determined and talented fool. Computer help-desk people have an acronym for it - 'PEBCAC', which stands for Problem Exists Between Computer And Chair. A serious amount of mental effort gets spent on human-computer interfaces (there are journals, conferences etc etc). In another life, I'd... Continue Reading →
“Technology versus the Leviathan”. But does it need a Leviathan? #innovation #democracy
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 →