Tag archive: justathought
Memories and Symbols
This month 2 images caught my eye. First, the outpouring of grief and admiration for Nelson Mandela. There has rarely...
The Philippines
In the 1950s Manila was the banking capital of Asia. The Philippines had more telephones per head than Hong Kong....
Trade Liberalization versus Industrial Policy
Bilateral, regional and global trade agreements are all part of the modern landscape of international economic relationships. They are based...
Just Thinking
There is little point in saying something for the sake of it. A journo, a politician, a blogger, is often...
Another Age
I have just finishing reading the posthumously published lectures of British Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm who died October 2012. Fractured...
The Revenge of Cybernetics?
If the “medium is the message” then the message in the age of the Internet is that everything we now...
Try Forecasting the Past
In 2010, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, two respected Harvard economists, shot to fame for publishing a paper that seemed...
Lost and Found in Translation
Words. Here is an example of some, imaginatively (and unexpectedly) cited by the ITU’s Trends in Telecoms Reform 2013. (And...
It Ain’t Necessarily So
In the world of social media and instant online news feeds, what actually constitutes ‘news’ is rather problematic. The 140-character...
No News is Bad News
In March, two announcements were made pointing in opposite directions. First, Google announced the closing down of Google Reader, a...
What’s there to think about?
2013 is the year of the Water Snake in the Chinese zodiac. Water is considered to have the colour black,...
Information over the Internet
At Davos this month Tim Berners-Lee, regarded widely as the father of the World Wide Web, warned of silos that...
Dotty.com
2012 ended on a discordant note for the Internet. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) is the forum at which governments...
Irrational Expectations?
Nate Silver is a clever man. Using “quants” he correctly predicted the outcome of the US presidential race in every...
Telecoms and Security: Old Wine in New Bottles
A recent report by the US Senate warned that entry of telecom equipment manufacturer Huawei into the US market would...
Standards for Standards
No one wants to risk using a drug that is not fully tried and tested and accredited by the relevant...
Net Neutrality Revisited
Regulatory capture was a concept developed by economist George Stigler of the University of Chicago, but it was already a...
3D Printing
It used to be the case that a dental patient wanting a crown for a tooth needed to sit through...
Technology, Oh Technology and Manchester City
On May 7th hundreds of millions of viewers around the world watched the exciting climax to the English Premier League...
How Unassailable is Facebook?
2012 is scheduled as the year Facebook goes public. It has been well advertised that Facebook does not need the...
Artificial Intelligence – More Brawn than Brain?
The IT world is getting faster all the time. Telcos are upgrading to high speed broadband NGNs; the processing power...