Category: Columns
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ID cards are a civil servant’s dream – and the public’s worst nightmare
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The beaches of Dover are awash with abandoned plastic left by the dinghy migrants, but Stephen Kinnock has proposed adding some more – the Shadow Minister for Immigration has floated the idea of introducing ID cards. Surely, Kinnock mused, we could introduce a basic national card, while protecting civil liberties? He was quickly slapped down by…
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Predicting the future from the social media swamp
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About 20 years ago my techno-utopian friends in California began to have a strange glint in their eye. It’s the sort of glint people acquire after joining a religious cult, and they were obsessed with a new idea. What they believed was that with so many people now communicating via the internet, what they called…
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The Cult of the Business Guru, and the pop psychology anecdotalists that business doesn’t need
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“Some people can only think in anecdotes, it appears, and are deft at using them as a social currency. In recent years, it is this group that has been in the ascendancy in many organisations.” How Malcolm Gladwell created the template for modern business fads. Read more at The Daily Telegraph. … Read More
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Like kicking dead whales down a beach: understanding the Great Hydrogen Delusion
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Engineers will rarely tell you something is impossible, even when your proposal is a very bad idea. Computer scientists at Stanford and MIT in the 1970s came up with a wonderful expression for this, an assignment that was technically feasible, but highly undesirable. They called it “kicking a dead whale down a beach”. The folklore…
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Electric cars have a very dirty secret
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A new restaurant has opened in town. Only the portions are small, the food is cold and tasteless, and the service is grumpy and indifferent. The owners appeal to the Government, who promptly ban all rival restaurants in a 25-mile radius. If this sounds madly improbable, it shouldn’t. The principle is alive and well in…
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The unquenchable greed of Wikipedia
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At Christmas, charities launch their most emotive appeals. After almost two years of seeing their fundraising crippled by lockdowns and social distancing, they are more needy than ever. But I would think carefully before responding to one particularly aggressive annual solicitation.… Read More