Shooting The Messenger – How Britain’s Chilling Laws Put Freedom of Speech In The Deep Freeze

These are dangerous days to be a messenger. Hardly a week passes without another story of a journalist or photographer shot, murdered or imprisoned as they attempt to do their job – to give witness to events in a dangerous world. We like to think that Britain, with its raucous tabloid press, lively literary scene and tradition of free expression,...

Fiction as a Mirror: How Stories Reflect Society, Power, and Tech

Fiction as a Mirror: How Stories Reflect Society, Power, and Tech

A novelist invents a “spice” that enables faster‑than‑light navigation; a TV episode gamifies social reputation with five-star ratings. Both are compact laboratories for testing how scarcity, incentives, and infrastructure shape behavior. Treat Fiction as a Mirror: Society, Power, and Technology—not as prediction, but as a simulator whose dials you can measure, stress, and reuse. You want a method, not a...

Books as Collectibles: The Art of Design, Format, and Value

Books as Collectibles: The Art of Design, Format, and Value

Run your fingers over a clothbound spine with foil-stamped type, then compare it to a glue-only paperback: the weight, stiffness, and even the sound when you open it feel different. Those sensory differences—paper at 100 gsm versus 70, Smyth-sewn signatures that lie flat versus perfect-binding that cracks—are not superficial; they shape whether a volume is merely read or cherished. If...

Measuring AI Performance: My Guide from Testing to Quality Control

Measuring AI Performance: My Guide from Testing to Quality Control

When a customer-support assistant I deployed began fielding 18,000 chats per week, two numbers decided whether we kept it online: a 2.4% hallucination rate that generated 160 escalations, and a p95 latency of 1.1 seconds that customers tolerated. Shrinking hallucinations to under 1% and keeping p95 below 1.0 seconds dropped escalations by 28% and saved roughly 40 agent-hours per day....

Urban

Urban Health: Shaping the Future of Fitness and Wellbeing

Beneath skyline cranes and cycling lanes, a new rule of thumb is emerging: the average urbanite can cut cardiometabolic risk by 20–30% with 8,000–10,000 steps per day and two brief strength sessions per week, if they also watch air, heat, and noise. That is the pragmatic core of Urban Health: Fitness and Wellbeing of the Future—where sensors guide decisions and...

Sustainable Beauty Meets Everyday Minimalism: A Practical Guide

Sustainable Beauty Meets Everyday Minimalism: A Practical Guide

One 60–80 g shampoo bar can replace two to three 250 ml plastic bottles, and the average adult uses around nine personal-care products daily. Multiply that across a year and a household, and the inputs—money, time, packaging, and water—scale quickly enough to feel inescapable. If you’re curious why people move toward cleaner formulas, minimal aesthetics, and mindful choices, here’s the...

Rebuilding Data Infrastructure for AI Success: My Playbook

Rebuilding Data Infrastructure for AI Success: My Playbook

In the past three years I’ve shipped AI systems that served 40ms fraud scores, refreshed a 2-billion vector index nightly, and survived a compliance audit that asked for column-level lineage across 11,000 tables. The lesson is unglamorous but liberating: AI succeeds or fails on data plumbing, not model theatrics. “Data Infrastructure for AI Success” is not a slogan; it’s a...