I’ll have a bunch of original art in an art show coming up soon.
Reading
The team over at Arcbeatle Press have been in touch with details of their P.R.O.B.E.: Out of the Shadows, short story anthology, continuing from the BBV Doctor Who spin-off films, which is now available to purchase from Amazon.
"Welcome to the Preternatural Research Bureau, also known as P.R.O.B.E. For decades P.R.O.B.E. has defended Earth from the strange, the paranormal, and the alien. Hidden away from the eyes of the public. Times have changed.
The Hunter Street entrance to the Hunter Connection shopping arcade is a canopy of mirrored tiles and neon lights, like the entrance to a 1980s nightclub. The mirror panels reflect the street and the people walking past, the angles and edges scrambling and distorting the scene below. Go under the mirrors and inside and you’ll […]
With the Comprehensive Spending Review due next Wednesday, I thought it might be worth making some general points about student loans (in anticipation of potential changes to repayment thresholds and other parameters). I do not think student loans are a good vehicle for redistributive measures. As I told a couple of parliamentary committees in 2017, […]
A global pandemic in the digital age has been a dangerous cocktail resulting in widespread misinformation. Director, Brigid van Wanrooy … More
A relatively new field of research offers insight into the intersection of being both Indigenous and of the LGBTIQ+ community … More
Here’s a Lennonology exclusive provided by Chip Madinger … EXCLUSIVE CONTENT ON THE JAPANESE ‘LET IT BE’ SUPER DELUXE EDITION For nearly 40 years, nearly since the advent of the CD, The Beatles and Apple have managed to keep the digital contents … Continue reading
I’ve just written a 13-city scan of homelessness planning across Canada. A summary of the report is available here: https://nickfalvo.ca/innovation-in-homelessness-system-planning-a-scan-of-13-canadian-cities/
Few of us who have survived the last year aren’t grateful for technology.
Zoom, email, connected workplaces and solid internet connections at home have made it possible to work, shop, study and carry on our lives in a way that wouldn’t have been possible had the pandemic hit, say, 20 years earlier.
But parts of big tech — the parts that track us and drive us to think dangerous and antisocial things just so we keep clicking — are doing us enormous damage.
Although it might seem like we can’t have the best of both worlds — the connectivity without the damage — I reckon we can. But we are going to have to change the way we think about big tech.
The first thing is to recognise that big tech is intrinsically weak. Yes, weak. The second is that it has only become strong each time we have let it.
By “big tech” I mean Facebook and Google and related companies such as Instagram and YouTube (owned by Facebook and Google respectively).
It is highly doubtful whether the increasing use of economic sanctions in international politics is just, expedient, or effective. And when proponents of these punitive measures claim that commerce is possible only between civilized people, they ignore the civilizing effect of commerce itself.
On a Sunday in the summer of 1970, we were all herded up to the little church in Cúil Aodha for Mass. We were city kids sent to this small and remote village in County Cork to learn Irish from the native speakers. Their little chapel was gray, pebble-dashed, with no steeple, more like a […]
The post Ireland’s Coming of Age and Mine appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
Eight in ten of Australia’s leading economists back action to cut Australia’s carbon emissions to net-zero.
Almost nine in ten want it done by a carbon tax or a carbon price – mechanisms that were explicitly rejected at the 2013 election.
The panel of 58 top Australian economists selected by the Economic Society of Australia wants the carbon price restored to the public agenda even though it was rejected seven years ago, some saying Australia’s goods and services tax was rebuffed in 1993 and then restored to the public agenda seven years later.
Among those surveyed are former heads of government departments and agencies, former International Monetary Fund and OECD officials and a former and current member of the Reserve Bank board.
The EU’s proposals on the Northern Ireland protocol offered what business leaders wanted, but the prime minister prefers failure and grievance
Last week, Boris Johnson, with his paintbrush and easel at his holiday villa in Marbella, touched up his self-portrait as the reincarnation of Winston Churchill. Meanwhile, another bodysnatcher, Johnson’s Brexit tsar, David Frost, was also in sunny Iberia. In Lisbon on Tuesday evening, he channelled the intellectual father of modern conservatism, the 18th-century Irish writer and politician Edmund Burke.
Frost demanded that the EU agree to rewrite completely the Northern Ireland protocol of the withdrawal treaty that Johnson hailed in October 2019 as a “fantastic deal for all of the UK”. His speech was entitled, in imitation of a famous Burke pamphlet, “Observations on the present state of the nation”.
Continue reading...Minting The Coin is one thing; Depositing The Coin entirely another
Why that title? Well, the name seems to mislead people into thinking that the provider of student finance is a private institution, potentially making profit out of students, when it is in fact publicly owned. There are 20 shares in the SLC: 17 are owned by the Department for Education (which has responsibility for English-domiciled […]
Self-destructive thoughts and feelings grow from ripples to tidal waves in people who develop addictions. But how does self-directed aggression become entrenched in our inner worlds, and how can it be dislodged? Everyone who’s ever been addicted to anything is bound to know two feelings — craving and self-hatred. These feeling states essentially define addiction. […] (Read the rest.)
Herewith, a scene from last night’s interview with legendary web & book designer (and Dean of The Cooper Union School of Art) Mike Essl, who shared his portfolio, career highlights, early web design history, and more. Fun! If you get a chance to meet, work with, or learn from Mike, take it. He’s brilliant, hilarious, […]
The post My Night With Essl appeared first on Zeldman on Web and Interaction Design.
About a week ago, @tomasino published a post on his contract-based dependency management idea (aka CBDM), and I would be lying if I said I didn’t like it.
Not only does it provide a better model for dependency management than SemVer or any other versioning scheme, but it also:
Never has an inquiry into the skyrocketing price of homes been more urgent.
Rarely has one been as insultingly ill-suited as the one under way right now.
Midway through last year in the midst of COVID, the average forecast of the 22 leading economists who took part in The Conversation mid-year survey was for no increase in home prices whatsoever in the year ahead (actually for slight falls).
At that time the typical (median) Sydney house price was A$1 million, where it stayed until the end of the year.
Then it took off. In the ten months to the start of this month the typical Sydney house price soared $300,000 to $1.3 million – a breathtaking increase (and an awfully big penalty for delaying buying) of $1,000 each day.
I’m teaching a two-part training next month titled “Innovative Practices in Homelessness.” All information on the training is available here: https://mailchi.mp/3adbcfc2fcad/e-news-cih-canada-445734?e=856cbdaeac
My COVID19 reading has just included, after more years than I care to remember, a re-reading of Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars. My copy is a Pelican paperback from 1954, one of Penguin's postwar nonfiction series with blue borders around a no-nonsense white front cover, price 2/6, two shillings and sixpence. On the fly-leaf is my name in blue ink, in my father's handwriting; I guess he gave it to me when I was at school. The pages are yellowing now, and their edges sometimes flake off under my fingers; this pelican wasn't built to last. The text is the sixth edition, from 1932. First edition only five years earlier - the book was unexpectedly popular.
I’m attempting a new strategy in my Introduction to Advertising course. This semester, any student who competes eight hours on LinkedIn Learning will be able to “power up” their Final Exam to an automatic 100. So how did this come about? Students are eager to learn hard skills. Students often bring up in end of […]
He was the greatest English novelist of his generation, yet just before his death he became an Irish citizen of the EU. The reasons were both political and deeply personal, but at their heart lay one thing: betrayal
• An exclusive extract from his new novel
• Writers reveal their favourite le Carré
I’m looking at one of the last photographs of John le Carré. It was taken by his son Nick in October 2020. There is a mostly empty bottle of good beaujolais in front of him and a glimpse through the window behind of the Cornish landscape that he inhabited with such delight. His beloved wife and most important collaborator, Jane, is seated next to him, laughing heartily.
BBC Studios has today announced the next instalment in the Doctor Who: The Collection range with Season 17, offering Doctor Who fans the opportunity to continue building their own home archive on Blu-ray. Starring Tom Baker in his penultimate season, Doctor Who – The Collection: Season 17 consists of: