by JAK | May 10, 2012 | big ideas, culture, industry futures
The parliamentary elections in NZ last year will be remembered for having the lowest voter turnout since 1887 At the time a lot of commentators opined that this was the result of Labour Party voters staying away in droves because they knew they couldn’t beat...
by JAK | May 9, 2012 | big ideas, culture, industry futures
What if David Attenborough could sing? How about Stephen Hawking? Brian Cox? Well thanks to John Boswell at Symphony of Science they can and the results are surprising, delightful, educational and musically inventive. When my daughter was younger we watched hours of...
by JAK | May 3, 2012 | big ideas, culture, general business, industry futures
Last year a couple of big finance stories caught my attention. I had just seen the movie Inside Job . What was very interesting to me was the idea that economists and other academics in the finance world had been utterly compromised by the global financial meltdown....
by JAK | Mar 24, 2012 | culture, music
John Cooper Clarke was like some wordy icarus who flew too close to the sun & got sucked in by a blackhole Never mind the metaphors – on Thursday he was back, better than ever in Auckland town live at the Kings Arms. “People all ask me the same...
by JAK | Feb 7, 2012 | big ideas, culture, industry futures
As promised I finished reading Jeffrey Sachs – “The Price of Civilization” – Economics and Ethics After the Fall. The book was an easy read but at the end of it left me feeling somewhat underwhelmed. Rebooting the US economic and political...
by JAK | Jan 16, 2012 | culture, industry futures, music
One of the most fascinating chapters in Daniel Levitin’s book “This is Your Brain on Music” is about how musical tastes are often set early in life and become quite hard to change later on. It has been a while since I read the book but Levitin goes...
