William H. Dutton

A report, entitled ‘Dilemmas of Privacy and Surveillance: Challenges of Technological Change’, is available from the Royal Academic of Engineering (26 March 2007) at: http://www.raeng.org.uk/policy/reports/default.htm I was a member of the advisory committee that helped shape the report and found the process and its outcome to be a useful, multi-disciplinary and balanced treatment of the [...]

Jeremy Sutton will be giving a lecture and demonstration on digital painting at the OII on 28 June, entitled ‘A Tale of Two Portraits: From Crayon to Computer. The Role of Digital Fine Art Media in Live Portraiture’. An added feature is that Jeremy will be offering a seminar throughout the next day at Pembroke [...]

A variety of influential reports and committees are moving surveillance issues up on the UK public agenda. See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6479395.stm We will be able to address this issue soon through the Oxford Internet Surveys, with the fielding of our 2007 survey, which will provide systematic empirical data that will enable us to compare actual public concern [...]

Let me call your attention to an excellent summary of a very useful and creative workshop on the ‘History and Future of Infrastructure: Lessons for New Scientific Cyberinfrastructures’ held in Ann Arbor in September 2006. The summary report on the workshop is authored by Edwards, P. N., Jackson, S. J., Bowker, G. C., and Knobel, [...]

There is a provocative piece in the New York Magazine on Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy, entitled ‘Say Everything’. It asks why kids (some 26 years of age) reveal so much about themselves on the Internet. A couple of explanations are offered from an interview with NYU Professor Clay Shirky. The most [...]

Chair, or Head, of Trust – Steering the BBC, 2007 and Onwards David Puttnam has written (The Spectator, 3 February 2007, pp 20-21) that “the director-general (of the BBC) … also chairs the executive board …”; Puttnam is thus unlikely to have written the headline to his article (“Memo To The New BBC Chair…”) because [...]