After all this discussion of journalism, it’s only fair to turn the focus on to my current industry – higher education. Despite the fact that most academics spend a fair bit of their time trying to come up with new ideas, it is not often regarded as an overly innovative field. This is probably due […]
Here is a bit from a superb interview with linguist Dennis Baron about the impact of new technologies on communication: Historically, when the new communication device comes out, the reaction tends to be divided. Some people think it’s the best thing since sliced bread; other people fear it as the end of civilization as we […]
One topic that is guaranteed to get my classes fired up is Apple. They’re great to use as an example because they elicit a strong reaction. Consequently, I’ve been giving some thought to some of the issues surrounding iPhones, particularly as they relate to other 3g phones, like Google’s Android-based phones. Whatever you might think […]
Do things always get better as they evolve? I touched on this idea recently, and I think the answer is definitely ‘No’. Now Wired has made the point for me again with an interesting article on innovations that are not big jumps forward technologically, but rather simply good enough. The idea is that some products […]
I read Why Stock Markets Crash by Didier Sornette last year, and I thought it was a pretty good book. Sornette builds on the quantitative work of Benoit Mandelbrot to make models of market bubbles using non-linear dynamics. The basic idea is that bubbles are created when the expectations of people in a market become […]
That’s me wearing my new iPod headphones. Strangely, I caught a fair bit of stick for wearing them today – including a relatively sarcastic ‘nice retro look’. I thought this was particularly interesting in light of a nice post I read this morning called The Myth of Evolutionary Ascent (found via John Wilkins’ blog). The […]
Doyne Farmer is pretty much a genius. And a very engaging speaker. This is a talk he gave a couple of months ago, reviewing ten years of physicists’ work on finance. I saw Farmer speak at one of the first conferences that I went to, on econophysics in Canberra – and he was absolutely captivating. […]
Here are the slides from a talk I gave this morning: Innovation Business Models View more Microsoft Word documents from Tim Kastelle. They might not make much sense as standalones – so here’s a summary of the two main points. The first is that invention and innovation are two different things. It is pretty closely […]
I was thinking again about the discussion here last week about fuzzy concepts – in particular that of networks. In that post, I was trying to get at the value of the network concept for economic analysis. Neil Kay made an interesting point in the comments – which was that you could substitute the word […]
