I just watched Chuck. All 91 episodes of it. There is something about this five season spy spoof that really worked for me. Without a doubt it’s my favorite TV show since I watched Buffy some fifteen years ago. You can like a TV show for all sorts of reasons, but loving a TV show […]
Year: 2014
You Kippers
Imagine if you will a super-national organisation dedicated to peace. It’s population is over half a billion, and it has the largest GDP on Earth (some 16.6 trillion US dollars). It is a fiercely progressive place, with universal suffrage, laws to foster equality for women, protection for children, rights for homosexuals, and none – absolutely […]
Brutal Engineering
Over the last few months I have been co-organising a workshop for this year’s Web Science Conference on interdisciplinary; the aim is to collect together interdisciplinary experiences (from Coups and Calamities) and reflect on some of the disciplinary differences that make Web Science research so interesting. It has caused me to pause and reflect a […]
A Positive No: Why Britain Needs Systems Engineering
It has been said that for Scotland, being in a union with England is like being in bed with an elephant. The numbers speak for themselves. Scotland has a population of just over 5 million, England over 53 million. That makes Scotland around the same size (in population) as Yorkshire, England’s largest county. It is […]
How to Fail
It’s that time of year, a time of renewal, of promises… of revision. Yes, spare some thoughts for the poor students, still nursing their New Year hangovers as they consider the exams awaiting them this January. For some of them it will be the first time they have been assessed at University, the first time […]