I have just returned from a fascinating conference at MIT on Security and Human Behaviour and am now preparing for the EU Green Week conference in Brussels.  This post explores an issue common to both conferences: paranoia.
The “security” of central interest to the MIT conference was that of people using the Internet. The titles [...]

In December 2007 I delivered a Working Paper entitled “Managing risk in a hypermobile world” to the OMEGA Project  - a project dedicated to thinking about Mega Projects in Transport and Development.
I began thus:
“Transport projects facilitate new connections between trip origins and destinations. In so doing they disturb previous patterns of connection, often with difficult [...]

Dear Sir
Simon Jenkins (4 April 2008) exposes the Achilles heel of all the proposed eco-towns: transport. But he is a trifle hard on the motives of the original proponents of the garden cities and new towns. Relieving the squalid, densely packed, inner city slums by providing houses in new settlements, with gardens, in which people [...]

My nomination for the most prescient work of science fiction is The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster. Writing in 1909, not only did he anticipate television, the Internet, video conferencing, email, Amazon, Google and Globalization but, more significantly, the impact that they would have on our lives.
It is a short story about a world in [...]