“Only in economics is endless expansion seen as a virtue. In biology it is called cancer.” (From David Pilling’s book “The Growth Delusion”). Pilling’s core contention is that gross domestic product – the measurement upon which so much economic analysis is based – is an arbitrary, oversimplified construct that we “slavishly follow” for no good …
On the face of it, Europe is a leader in tackling climate change, on course to get 20 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. But the biggest source of renewable energy in the European Union isn’t one of the ones everyone talks about – wind, solar or even hydro. Actually, the …
Privacy and security? All is not lost. The techies are working on it. Read on………… We need to combine the control and personal autonomy of the early web with the ease and usefulness of the one we have today. A project called Solid, led by none other than Tim Berners-Lee himself, seeks to separate our …
Continue reading ‘Fighting back against data harvesting (No. 2)’ »
Data harvesting: the problem The original World Wide Web, invented by Tim Berners-Lee at the particle physics centre CERN near Geneva in 1999, was a “decentralised” affair. There were no central servers; websites ran on individual machines in universities, offices and bedrooms. Hosting a site just meant plugging a computer into your internet connection and …
Continue reading ‘Fighting back against data harvesting, No.1’ »
Climate change is without doubt the biggest threat facing the world. Although it doesn’t mean the end of civilisation just yet, the adverse effects of climate change are getting progressively worse. Extreme weather is becoming more frequent. Crop yields in many parts of the developing world are becoming more common. Drought has become a routine …
Continue reading ‘The Epicurean solutions to climate change’ »
