When I started university I thought I would be a math major. I had always been pretty good at math, and, just as importantly, I had always enjoyed it. Things went well reasonably well until the second semester, when we started working with n-dimensional matrices. Because I couldn’t visualise n dimensions, I had real problems […]
One week after I told my class that I thought that either China or India would build infrastructure for hydrogen fuel cell cars before any of the western countries did, the New York Times reports that China is trying to become the world leader in electric cars. So I was close! My reasoning was that […]
Kevin Kelly has put his book New Rules for the New Economy online – readable for free. Personally, I find nearly everything that Kelly writes worth reading, but this book in particular is essential. It’s pretty easy to discount a book written about the ‘new internet economy’ written over 10 years ago – it’s a […]
A significant component of economic activity in Australia is carried out in the sector of capital goods. Compared with our knowledge of innovation in consumer goods, capital goods are a poorly understood part of the Australian economy. Broadly speaking, capital goods can categorized as follows (Acha et al. 2004): (a) Constructs required for production of […]
One the things that makes the current state of the music and newspaper industries so frustrating is that there are many steps that could have been taken to prevent these outcomes. It was not inevitable that their business models had to be destroyed by the internet. One of the questions that came up in the […]
I just finished reading Old Man’s War by John Scalsi. Overall, it was pretty entertaining. One part of it reminded me of a conversation about innovation from earlier in the week. The book is set well into the future, and there are three types of humans around. The first is the normal everyday variety, like […]
