Banks don’t even bother verifying signatures on checks less than $30,000; it’s cheaper to deal with fraud after the fact than prevent it. Notes Bruce Scheneier in passing, in an essay which starts from the oddity of fax signatures and goes on from there. That approach presumably relies on counter-parties to detect and report that [...]
The Innovator’s Dilemma is a book, published just over ten years ago, the central argument of which is that it is very hard for dominant firms in a market to innovate radically, because by doing so they risk destroying their existing business. If they don’t, though, they make themselves vulnerable to some upstart which doesn’t [...]
From Robert Niles via Doc Searls: Readers owe you nothing. They have no responsibility as citizens to read your reporting, and no responsibility as consumers to look at your ads. They have the right, and ability, to go about their lives without ever once glancing at your publication. If you want people to read your [...]
Amazon is implementing a new design for its site. At least I think they are – there is no announcement, no razzmatazz. But there is a new design which at first sight is a more radical change than they have done for a long time – the navigation tabs across the top have been replaced [...]
Seth Godin has listed fourteen “things you can learn from the music business (as it falls apart).” The examples he uses are very specific to the music industry. But quite a few of the lessons have some eerie resonance in the government industry too:
Producing consumption and consuming production, prousage and co-production in the context of social policy.
Time. perhaps, to find something positive to say about HMRC and their approach to customers and their data. Income tax is a system within which people accrue liabilities to pay money to government, which they meet either by not seeing the money in the first place because tax is deducted at source or by paying [...]
Each year on 11 November, Teresa Neilsen Hayden writes about the first world war – a compendium of thoughts and links which bring home the enormity of the horror. Last year, she reported a conversation with a friend: We were talking about the way the military on both sides kept trying mass “over the top” [...]
The General Theory of Not-Gardening A Major Contribution to Social Anthropology, Ontology, Moral Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Political Theory and Many Other Fields of Scientific Investigation Those who hate gardening need a theory. Not to garden without a theory is a shallow, unworthy way of life. A theory must be convincing and scientific. Yet to various [...]
A few days ago, I was reading a book about how ideas stick. What happened next shows just how sticky they can be. This is the passage from the book: A few years back, a group of hospital administrators asked the design firm IDEO to help improve the hospital’s workflow. The team at IDEO knew [...]