Category: Human Nature

Posted on

TechLines: Email is dead, what next?

Has email reached its use-by date as a business tool? If so, what next? That topic was explored in the combined ZDNet Australia / Lifehacker Australia TechLines webcast last week. Here’s the 66-minute end product.

If the embedded video doesn’t work, try over here.

Panellists were anthropologist Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow at Intel Labs; Alistair Rennie, general manager of Lotus Software and WebSphere Portal at IBM’s Software Group; futurist Mark Pesce; and Adele Beachley, who is RIM’s managing director for Australia and New Zealand i.e. from BlackBerry Land. It was hosted by the ABC’s James O’Loghlin.

I was in the audience, invited specifically so I could ask a question. Indeed, I get one in at the end. You’ll see me in the front row with a silver MacBook Pro in my lap.

I found the whole thing fascinating. O’Loghin worked well as a host too, I reckon. But I was wondering why for a webcast we needed the full six-camera broadcast production style. Freemantle Media did a good job, don’t get me wrong. But it’s an expensive way of doing things. Oh well, it wasn’t my money…

Anyway, have a squizz and let me know what you think.

Posted on

Anzac Day 2010: Recycled

It’s Anzac Day, Australia’s national memorial for those who’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for our country, and that other country.

I’ve written two quite lengthy pieces for the last two years, Anzac Day Rememberings and then Anzac Day 2009: Sacrifice. I have nothing more to add today.

They shall grow not old,
As we that are left grow old,
Age shall not weary them,
Nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun,
And in the morning
We will remember them.
Lest we Forget

As I wrote last year, we trust that our politicians, who decide where and when these men and women serve, make worthy decisions about their most valuable contributions. Sometimes they never return, or return… changed.

Prime Minister Rudd, Sir, are you making worthy decisions? Tony Abbott, are your policy proposals also worthy? Please look me straight in the eye when you answer that.

[Photo credit: The rosemary sprig was taken from Matthew Hall‘s Twitter page from 2008. If I owe someone for that usage, I’ll make good.]

Posted on

50 to 50 #5: Dangerous play

[This post is part of the series 50 to 50, fifty posts in the lead-up to my 50th birthday in May. Originally intended to be one per day, with the final one on the birthday itself, it’s been disrupted by my work schedule. There will still be fifty posts, just not one per day.]

The great thing about growing up on a farm is that there’s about eleventy hundred ways of killing yourself and you get to try them all.

In the photo, there’s a pine tree on the right behind me and my brother. Yes, a brother. He was born in 1963, so there’s a three year gap. I’ll get to the pine tree in a moment.

On the left is the cement-brick milking shed. Immediately to its right, off in the distance so you might want to look on the embiggened photo, is the pumphouse. And then the truck, well, that’s just a truck — although my father built it like Dr Frankenstein from bits of other, dead, trucks.

Just behind the truck’s engine compartment is dad’s shed, a crumpled heap of corrugated iron that’s no longer there. It was poorly lit and full of tools and wood scraps and junk and half a dozen unfinished projects. I didn’t like going in there, it was creepy. Strange creatures lived in the dark corners and would kill small children, I know that for sure.

Even if they were good children.

Mum and dad were pretty busy most of the time. My brother and I were left to our own devices. The huge open spaces of the farm, the sheds, the random bits of equipment all meant I could invent my own imaginary world.

Every trip out with the dogs — and the dogs went everywhere with us and took care of us, so we couldn’t possibly get into any trouble — became some sort of combat patrol.

But watch out for the snakes!

Continue reading “50 to 50 #5: Dangerous play”

Posted on

Patch Monday: Parents don’t act on cyber-safety fears

ZDNet Australia logo: click for Patch Monday episode 35

Most Australian parents are concerned about the safety of their children online. But new research shows that parents don’t back up their concerns with meaningful actions, and that in any event they might well be concerned about the wrong risks.

Last week Microsoft Australia released their “For Safety’s Sake” research [PDF] which, while giving them a chance to pimp the parental controls in Windows 7, also produced some interesting figures.

While 64% of parents were concerned about cyber-safety, 65% don’t use any parental control software and 62% allow their kids to access the internet unsupervised.

Parents perceive their kids to be more at risk accessing the internet from friends’ homes than their own, and rate the risk from online predators as being more dangerous than exposure to pornography. In turn that’s seen as more dangerous than bullying, which is seen as more dangerous than identity theft.

In this week’s Patch Monday podcast I speak with Microsoft’s chief security advisor in Australia, Stuart Strathdee, as well as with child protection expert Karen Flanagan from Save the Children Australia. The risks are not what they seem.

You can listen below. But it’s probably better for my stats if you listen at ZDNet Australia or subscribe to the RSS feed or subscribe in iTunes.

Please let me know what you think — especially if you’re a parent. We accept audio comments too. Either Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.

Posted on

“Satay tofu burger”? No such thing!

The next time you see a café menu listing a “satay tofu burger”, please remember this Venn diagram.

Truly, there is no such thing as a “satay tofu burger”.

A burger has meat in it. Tofu is not meat, even if you cut it into little animal shapes — and that’s just self-deception anyway.

Satay is a peanut sauce for grilled or barbecued meat. If it’s not meat, it should not have satay sauce on it. End of story.

And even if you were using meat, a satay burger? What a wanker!

Posted on

Time to dump 20th Century “leadership”?

British Airways Corcorde G-BOAC at Manchester Aviation Park. Photo by Ian Britton, © FreeFoto.com.

Do we really think we can just bolt some sort of “government 2.0 module” onto steam-era bureaucracies and magically bring them into the 21st Century?

Sure, our governments served us fairly well in the 20th Century, at least in the West. They beat the bad guys in WWII, brought us through the scary Cold War and delivered health and prosperity our grandparents would have found unimaginable.

Not to mention Windows ME.

But times are changing. We’re starting to notice that things don’t work as well as they used to. We’re spending taxpayers’ money bailing out economies only to have bankers suck out more bonuses anyway. Conferences intended to agree on Climate Change action produce… well… nothing concrete. Sydney’s suburban railway network is slower than in the 1920s!

Having invested so much time and money on these institutions, though, we’re reluctant to let them go.

This is the sunk cost fallacy.

Concorde is the classic example. Long after it must have been clear to the French and British governments that no-one was going to buy this aircraft, they continued investing in it simply because they’d already spent so much and didn’t want to lose those “sunk costs”. Yet those costs were gone, no matter what. To continue spending was irrational.

The same happened in the Vietnam War, where US President Lyndon Johnson kept committing thousands of troops after he’d realised the cause was hopeless and America could not win.

Afghanistan, anyone?

I’ve written before, in Risk, Fear and Paranoia: Perspective, People!, that change is being held back by, well, fear and paranoia. But this morning I stumbled across Umair Haque’s The Builders’ Manifesto. He’s got it in one.

20th century leadership is what’s stopping 21st century prosperity.

Continue reading “Time to dump 20th Century “leadership”?”