Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

Presentation on Innovation (IceWeb 2008)

Posted in Ideas, Philosophy, english, tagged , , , , on November 15, 2008 | 3 Comments »

Ever since the banking crisis struck Iceland a few weeks ago, I’ve been running out and about to advocate for innovation as the way to rebuild the economy.
Yesterday, I was privileged to give a presentation on the topic at the IceWeb conference. The title of my talk was “The Innovation Renaissance” and the slides can [...]

Read Full Post »

Greiningadeild Hjalla

Posted in General, Philosophy, íslenska on October 23, 2008 | 19 Comments »

Ég er alger amatör í hagfræði og fjármálum. Ég hef samt ekki enn séð neinn virkilega rýna í stöðuna sem upp er komin hér á landi og hvert stóra myndin í efnahag þjóðarinnar stefnir og ef enginn vill gera hlutina fyrir mann, þá verður maður að gera þá sjálfur.
Eftirfarandi hugleiðingar geta því ekki verið [...]

Read Full Post »

Vorum við öll sofandi?

Posted in General, Philosophy, íslenska on October 14, 2008 | 8 Comments »

Undanfarnir dagar hafa verið merkilegir. Vikurnar tvær hér á undan virðast hafa farið í þunglyndi og “refresh” á mbl.is, vb.is og Eyjunni hjá voðalega mörgum. Ég er þar engan veginn undanskilinn.
Síðustu tvo daga hef ég aftur á móti orðið þess var að þetta er mjög að snúast við. Fólk er farið að sjá tækifærin sem [...]

Read Full Post »

Peningar vs. raunveruleg verðmæti

Posted in General, Philosophy, íslenska on October 12, 2008 | 5 Comments »

Í hamaganginum undanfarna daga hafa sótt að mér allskyns heimspekilegar pælingar. Sumar þeirra snúast um eðli peninga og hversu mikið peningar eigi skylt við raunveruleg verðmæti. Þarna er ég ekki að tala um mjúku hliðina – að raunveruleg verðmæti felist í ást, kærleika og hamingju (slíkt er einfaldlega á öðrum kvarða) – heldur hefðbundin veraldleg [...]

Read Full Post »

The future of finance: Total transparency?

Posted in Ideas, Philosophy, data, english on October 6, 2008 | 4 Comments »

The financial crisis hit Iceland full force last Monday. One of our banks was pretty much nationalized, followed by a large investment company filing the equivalent of Chapter 11. This led to significant losses by a large “risk free” money market fund, that stored a part or all of the personal savings of some [...]

Read Full Post »

Adventures in copyright: Open access, data and wikis

Posted in General, Philosophy, data, english, langtech on April 18, 2008 | 14 Comments »

I’ve just had a very interesting experience that sheds light on some important issues regarding copyright, online data and crowdsourced media such as wikis. I thought I’d share the story to spark a debate on these issues.
For a couple of years I’ve worked on and off on a simple web based system for maintaining [...]

Read Full Post »

Dear Apple – may we pay?

Posted in General, Philosophy, english on February 3, 2008 | 1 Comment »

Update (Feb 7): Updated the estimated number of iPhones in Iceland in light of more reliable data.
As stated before: I live in a small country, nobody wants my money.
In the couple of years since I wrote that post, I’ve been watching in awe as my fellow Icelanders – and in fact a lot of [...]

Read Full Post »

Visited Countries – Revisited

Posted in General, Ideas, Philosophy, english on December 29, 2006 | Leave a Comment »

When I read Bill Bryson’s fantastic book “A Short History of Nearly Everything“, one of the things that stood out, was a reminder that the world is still a really big place.
Even though we feel that we can – with a credit card, and a solid visa – get pretty much anywhere in the world [...]

Read Full Post »

Personal Blogs are the Public Life Bits

Posted in Philosophy on January 12, 2004 | Leave a Comment »

A few months ago I wrote about “Memories for Life“, a proposal for a Grand Challenge in computer science. The aim of that Grand Challenge was to find ways to store, index and secure our digital memories, i.e. the digital trail that we’re constantly building in the form of digital photos, email correspondence, browsing [...]

Read Full Post »

Scientists Have Found That Scientists Are Often Wrong

Posted in Philosophy on January 2, 2004 | 2 Comments »

I tend to be very skeptical about news articles where the headline reads: “Scientists have found that…”. Too often the scientist or researchers involved aren’t even named and there is no way of digging in further to see if it was indeed professional scientific work that led to the conclusion.
This is especially annoying as [...]

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »