Posts from the “Ideas & big thinking” Category

Texting for better transport

Posted on 2 May 2013

That noisy person talking loudly on their mobile phone on the bus might be annoying for everyone else on the trip, but in the not-too-distant future their chatter will be part of the cumulative big data that will help urban planners decide where transport routes should go. By mapping mobility data—the coarse geospatial information generated as your mobile phone connects to or is transferred between radio towers—infrastructure planners can create a picture of how people move about an area and modify service delivery accordingly. While we haven’t seeing this kind of responsive planning design in local government town planning offices just yet (that I am award of anyway), the potential was demonstrated in AllAboard, an entry by the IBM Smarter Cities Technology Centre at IBM’s research lab…

Categories: Built & natural environments, Geolocation & maps, Ideas & big thinking, People & place

Tagged: AllAboard (transportation model), Data for Development Challenge, Francesco Calabrese (researcher), IBM, IBM Research – Ireland, IBM Smarter Cities Technology Centre, MIT Technology Review, NetMob, Orange

Crux of Crean’s Creative Australia is to cut the cultural cringe

Posted on 13 March 2013

Today the Honourable Simon Crean MP, Minister for the Arts, released Australia’s first national cultural policy in almost 20 years. There’s plenty of commentary about it, much of which, like me, is excited and impressed by it’s vision and it’s genuine relevance. But what I’ve read so far seems to miss an important point about this policy, which has prompted me to add my 2 cents. At it’s crux, Crean’s Creative Australia cuts through arts policy wonk and social stigma alike revealing the truth about the arts that those of us in the sector have long known: that the arts is a dynamic and vibrant part of Australian social and economic endeavour. For fear of wonking myself, let me explain what I mean. The…

Categories: Creativity & content, Desktops & devices, Ideas & big thinking, Internetz & the social web, Money & economics, People & place, Politics & policy

Tagged: arts, arts policy, Australia Council for the Arts, Australia in the Asian Century (white paper), Hon Simon Crean MP, National Broadband Network, National Cultural Policy (Australia), National Curriculum (Australia), Office for the Arts (Australia)

An open letter to the publishers of JSTOR

Posted on 13 January 2013

Below is a letter co-signed by Fee Plumley and I sent to the President and JSTOR Managing Director at JSTOR’s publisher ITHAKA, encouraging them to name their free accounts in memoriam of Aaron Swartz. Fee and I are encouraging like-minded people to join us in this call. Please read the letter. If you support the idea, please add your name as a co-signatory in the comments below the letter or on the duplicate post on Fee’s reallybigroadtrip. Please feel free to share the letter with other like-minded people. Kevin M. Guthrie, President and Laura Brown, Executive Vice President and JSTOR Managing Director ITHAKA 2 Rector Street, 18th Floor New York, NY 10006 Dear Mr Kevin Guthrie and Ms Laura Brown We join you…

Categories: Ideas & big thinking

Tagged: Aaron Swartz, Fee Plumley, ITHAKA, JSTOR