Still feeling ill after yesterday’s Bruny Island Cruises eco-tour trip to Adventure Bay and a seal colony in the Great Southern Ocean. Amazing scenery and crew, but we hit rough weather on the way back, perhaps in part due to a tsunami warning. At a few points we feared the boat might capsize. Kenneth Kamler’s book Surviving the Extremes (2004) takes on a new meaning.
Lessons from sorting out a GPS that failed Sunday morning: Customers in a time-critical bind want a solution, not ‘shifting the blame’. Frontline staff need ‘decision rights’ and not to rely on managers who can’t be contacted at weekends. Unless you check it beforehand, critical technology will create revenge effects.
Today’s major task: finishing and submitting a research team’s ARC Discovery proposal. This has been a personal ‘shaping experience’. It takes a multi-university team up to ten months to craft a proposal. Apart from myself and the research team, the proposal had feedback from over 10 people. Advice to future applicants: read the ARC’s ‘funding guidelines’ and ‘instructions to applications closely; have lead-time to iteratively develop your proposal and form your team; and update your research impact and publication details in advance.
Alfred Hermida kindly sends me a forthcoming paper on ambient journalism, for a paper I’m drafting this week for the ERA C-ranked journal M/C. I picked up several Brian Eno events to review.
Wrote to Waldo Thompson on his website plans; Underbelly as a police-crime ‘repeated game’ in Australian culture; and its predecessor mini-series: Scales of Justice, Phoenix and Janus.
Several people sent me Larry Derfner’s Jerusalem Post article on Mossad and Mahmoud al-Mabouh’s assassination. Local coverage has emphasised Mossad’s alleged use of Australian passports for operational cover. Will this incident reinforce Mossad’s status amongst intelligence agencies and its reputation for careful operations? Or will the incident lead to a broader debate in intelligence studies about how counterdeception and operational security practices might, in certain outcomes, undermine an allies’ sovereignty? As an independent researcher, Robin Ramsay and Lobster Magazine is sure to explore this territory.