William H. Dutton

You might enjoy seeing the ‘trailer’ for a debate that was held at Balliol College and recorded and produced by Voices from Oxford. The short trailer gives you a sense of the speakers and the range of issues over two days. An edited Webcast of the debate will be available soon.

HM Treasury recently organized a consultation on the ‘implementation of the new Landline Duty to help fund the roll-out of Next Generation Access to 90 per cent of Britain by 2017.’ I’ve been critical of this proposal, which arose from the Government’s June 2009 Digital Britain White Paper. The idea was to impose a tax [...]

The Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania has teamed up with the IE University to hold an international forum on political communication that will bring together scholars and practitioners. This is orchestrated by Professor Monroe Price at the Annenberg School’s Global Communication Studies Centre, Magdalena Wojcieszak at IE and others, including colleagues at from [...]

The OII has posted a new Policy Briefing written by our Visiting Associate Tony Wales, former General Counsel of AOL International, responsible for the company’s worldwide legal affairs outside the US. He offers his insights on issues arising from the UK Government’s Digital Britain report (June 2009) and Digital Economy Bill, focusing in particular on [...]

Turing Lectures have been important agenda-setting events in the computer sciences and engineering. This year, Professor Chris Bishop, Chief Research Scientist at Microsoft Research Cambridge will be speaking on ‘Embracing Uncertainty: The New Machine Intelligence’. He’ll be doing a series of lectures in February and March. You can find dates and register online at www.theiet.org/turing [...]

The ESRC has just published a revised ‘Framework for Research Ethics (FRE)’, which is available in full on the Web. I would just like to draw from the  report here to highlight six key principles of ethical research — principles that the ‘ESRC expects to be addressed whenever applicable — are: 1. Research should be [...]