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Recommended Readings and Articles

Creative Capitalism: Bill Gates on a new approach to capitalism in the 21st century

CREATIVE CAPITALISM

Speech delivered at the World Economic Forum, January 24, 2008, in Davos, Switzerland

Thirty years, twenty years, ten years ago, my focus was totally on how the magic of software could change the world. I believed that breakthroughs in technology could solve the key problems. And they do – increasingly – for billions of people. But breakthroughs change lives only where people can afford to buy them – only where there is economic demand, and economic demand is not the same as economic need.

Gershon Review 2004: Releasing Resources for the Frontline (Independent Review of Public Sector Efficiency in the UK)

A former Chief Executive of the UK Treasury’s Office of Government Commerce, Sir Peter Gershon has undertaken several major strategic reviews for the UK Government on procurement including ICT a

Reflections on the Australia 2020 Summit

By Narelle Kennedy, Australia 2020 Delegate

The Australia 2020 summit with its catch cry of ‘Thinking Big' certainly had the sense of being an historic occasion.

It's Miller Time

Cover of AtlanticA 1967 prescient article by Arthur R. Miller shows that forty years ago, EHR and a national criminal data base seemed just around the corner, just as they are today. 

As today's rapid advances in computing technology fuel heated debate over the proper ethical, legal and practical boundaries to state and commercial data collection, it is easy to forget that although the technology is novel, the issue is nothing new.

A long tradition of dystopian novels, such as Kafka's 'The Trial', Zamyatin's 'We' and Orwell's '1984', warned of the dangers of the overbearing, bureaucratic state while, in grim reality, the oppression of people under communism was facilitated by a massive exercise in the collection and collation of information. Computers were rare and primitive in East Germany, yet the state maintained secret files on a quarter of its population and perhaps one adult in seven informed on their friends, neighbours and colleagues to the Stasi. 

The one unifying theme in past predictions of the future is their hopelessly dated nature today, but noted American legal scholar Arthur R. Miller did write a prescient article "The National Data Center and Personal Privacy" in the Atlantic Monthly of November 1967 warning of the dangers posed to personal privacy by computerised Government data banks. His arguments, further developed in 'The Assault on Privacy: Computers, Data Banks, and Dossiers'  in 1971, remain interesting less for their occasional paranoia regarding Governmental intentions than for their similarity to concerns raised as if novel today.

Implementing a Rational E-Health System in Australia

On 19 September 2007, Global Access Partners (GAP) held a strategic workshop discussing the challenge of implementing a rational e-health system in Australia in Parliament House, Canberra. It featured a paper commissioned by the Australian Centre for Health Research and written by Professor Michael Georgeff, CEO of Precedence Health Care Pty Ltd and Director of e-Health Research at Monash University.