Writer Nicholas Carr lit up the blogosphere with his recent Atlantic Monthly cover story, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," warning that Internet use might be hurting our ability to concentrate and contemplate. We explore what all that surfing and clicking might be doing to our brains.
It must be really tough being a stupid company on the Internet. Once you make a silly decision and it's out there, travelling via the Interwebs, you'll pay for it very dearly - and probably would be paying for it forever, as it is likely to become the first thing that customers discover about you on Google. We have a growing number of various consumer advocates blogs and online groups to thanks for that. The rise of Twitter has even compensated for the relative decline in the power of once very powerful blogs like The Consumerist - which have seen themselves somewhat silenced by the proliferation of aggressive "search engine optimization" services like ComplaintRemover.com, which remove / demote links to online complaints about companies and their products (or that Mother of All Complaints - their customer service). And still - blame it on social media, but almost every time I see a group of bloggers and social media guys take on a company that has made an outright stupid decision, they usually win. Not only because they are right, but because the company usually ends up paying much higher fees in publicity services to deal with a swell of the negative publicity - all embedded in the precious Google juice - than the losses it would incur from dealing with complaints from their conservative customers, who may want to restrict the publication of certain materials - be that photos of breast-feeding mothers or rankings of adult products.
This is the central platform for video lectures in any language and of any faculty worldwide. You are invited to add lectures or to edit the lecture descriptions. Use is open and free of charge, and will remain so.
Physics 8A: Introductory Physics - Fall 2007. Introduction to forces, kinetics, equilibria, fluids, waves, and heat. This course presents concepts and methodologies for understanding physical phenomena,
Wikipedia can be a great site when you need a quick reference on history, pop culture or even politics. But its reputation as an authoritative research resource is doubted by professors and other experts who deter students from quoting Wikipedia in their papers. One reason is that a lot of the information on Wikipedia is either incomplete or downright false. Because anyone can technically edit or contribute to Wikipedia, the site is vulnerable to hackers and vandalism. Sometimes, the blunders are serious libel cases which result in lawsuits; and sometimes, they’re just funny.
Young queer protesters gatecrashed the opening event of Manchester Pride 2008 in Albert Square. Pride had organised a balloon release by a group of 18 year olds (all of them white as far as I could see), in recognition of it being 18 years since the first August Bank Holiday event. However, as officials, the city’s tourist chief and Manchester’s Lord Mayor looked on, protesters surrounded the balloons, unfurled banners and waved placards in protest at the commercialisation of the city’s Pride, high ticket prices, low charity amounts and Pride's lack of inclusion.
I’ve already responded in another forum to Nick Carr’s essay, which I thought was very thought-provoking, if not entirely on target; I won’t repeat here what I said there. But in it you can see that I would disagree almost perfectly with Clay Shirky, who I want to respond to separately here.
Radley Balko has posted video of the SWAT raid on a Missouri home that he wrote about last February. This is the one where the Columbia Police Department busted in, fired seven shots at the family's dogs, and ended up recovering a small amount of marijuana ..
My name is Michael Sappir. I am an Israeli living in Leipzig, Germany, where I study linguistics. I am also a co-founder and alumnus of Sudbury Jerusalem, a Sudbury school in Israel, and currently a member of the Council of the European Democratic Education Community (EUDEC).
The 20th Century has gone, and now we live in the 21st Century, a digital century, but sometimes when we look around it feels like the same old world it always was. Cars, burning oil. Posters and adverts, neon and signage. Books made of paper. Some things change so slowly that the incremental differences go more or less unnoticed until we focus directly on them.
We make irrational decisions and simple mistakes every day. What's more, knowing that we do doesn't stop us from making them again. Why? Because that's just how we are and we'd best get used to it, argues Dan Ariely in Predictably Irrational. In this exclusive extract, he explains the cost of free goods
Dr. Roger Greenaway helps facilitators bring out the full benefits of active and experiential learning by providing articles about active reviewing and experiential learning
The Adelphi Charter on Creativity, Innovation and Intellectual Property is the result of a project commissioned by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce, London, UK, and is intended as a positive statement of what good intellectual property policy is. The Charter was issued on the 13th October, 2005.
Nietzsche wrote that a philosophy is always the biography of the philosopher. Maybe a biography of the philosopher by the philosopher himself is a piece of philosophy. So I shall tell you nine stories taken of my private life, with their philosophical morality... The first story is the story of the father and the mother.
Treaty concerning the Cession of the Russian Possessions in North America by his Majesty the Emperor of all the Russias to the United States of America
On our 14th outing, the ever-indignant Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio and I discussed my “Guantánamo Habeas Week” project (now expanded as “Guantánamo Habeas Fortnight”), in which I put together an interactive list of the 47 cases decided in the last 19 months (34 of which have been won by the prisoners), since the Supreme Court granted the prisoners constitutionally guaranteed habeas corpus rights back in June 2008, and have been examining, in detail, the unclassified opinions made by judges in these cases in recent months.
Poets.org has partnered with TextTelevision to offer TextFlows, an alternative approach to reading and experiencing poetry. By converting text dynamically into Flash animation, poems are revealed phrase by phrase through motion and light, and at a pace controlled by the reader. The simplified words and crisp motion fixes one's attention on the subtleties of language, increasing involvement, engagement, and understanding.
As MadDog and I were discussing on this thread, the May 6, 2004 Jack Goldsmith opinion on the warrantless wiretap program references an OLC opinion that appears not to have been publicly released or, even in the course of FOIA, disclosed.
Anselmo Lorenzo, sometimes called "the grandfather of Spanish anarchism," was one of the original Spanish anarchists. He was highly active within the movement from his meeting with Giuseppe Fanelli in 1868 until his death in 1914.
Since fatuously declaring his to be a "change" administration, President Barack Obama has quickly donned the blood-spattered mantle of state secrecy and executive privilege worn by the Bush regime.
director of the Vienna branch of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information IQOQI at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Zeilinger has been called a pioneer in the new field of quantum information and is renowned for his realization of quantum teleportation with photons.
As strange as it seems, because it’s still the same two of us and the love and commitment we’ve shared, you feel a strong family bond after you get married. My family has been accepting our relationship, but, right after our marriage, they accept her as part of the family. It’s amazing what legalize marriage can do you. I feel blessed.
In early discussions within the Open Sustainability Network, it was agreed that we didn’t want Yet Another Website. So we use existing resources: We didn’t set up a separate wiki, instead using Appropedia.* We didn’t set up a new social network, instead using an existing, like-minded community of people doing serious sustainability and knowledge-sharing work: Global Swadeshi. When someone suggested that OSN should be building a knowledge base, Lonny Grafman expressed that this is a job some of us are passionate about (indeed, that’s what Appropedia is doing) - but it’s not the role of OSN. OSN is for supporting and connecting these initiatives.
"To write about poetry is to believe that there are answers to some of the questions poets ask of their art, or at least that there are reasons for writing it," writes Michael Weigers, editor of the anthology One Art: Poems about Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2003).
Abū ‘Alī al-Ḥusayn ibn ‘Abd Allāh ibn Sīnā Balkhi', known as Abu Ali Sina Balkhi (Persian: ابوعلی سینا بلخى) or Ibn Sina (Persian: ابن سینا) and commonly known in English by his Latinized name Avicenna (Greek: Aβιτζιανός), (born c. 980 near Bukhara, contemporary Uzbekistan, died 1037 in Hamedan in modern Iran) was a Persian polymath and the foremost physician and philosopher of his time
Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen holds a very special place in the repertoire - an opera whose characters are a mixture of human beings and animals and that started life as a cartoon-strip in a newspaper. It tells the story of the life of a Vixen from the moment she is adopted as a pet by the Forester to the moment she is shot by the Poacher.
Michael Mosley takes an informative and ambitious journey exploring how the evolution of scientific understanding is intimately interwoven with society's historical path
Why did the program start with the assertion that The Origin of Species was the 'most deadly weapon' of science in its 'war against religion' ?
Has science really waged war against religion for as long as that, or is this just something of the last few decades in response to the growing creationist movement?
Radio 4 joins CERN on 10 September 2008 as scientists attempt to discover more about the origins of the Universe by recreating the aftermath of the Big Bang.
A shortlist of six films is made by the UK's leading critics, film-school heads and festival directors from the foreign language films released in that year in the UK. The winner is selected by a panel of judges whose decision making process is screened as part of the award ceremony, screened live on BBC Four.
BBC iPlayer relaunches today in an attempt to develop beyond "catch-up" - adding some new features that see the site integrate deeply with social networking sites, and compete with the personalised, flexible viewing offered by TV platforms such as Sky+. The new beta version at http://beta.bbc.co.uk/iplayer has a redesigned homepage that creates more space by separating TV and radio. Users are encouraged to sign in to the site to take advantage of the new features: it's free, and an existing bbc.co.uk ID can be used.
Marcus du Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, escorts you through the most important of all intellectual disciplines. Find out more about the series1.
Ahead of tonight's Micro Men programme, which charts the rivalry between Sir Clive Sinclair and Acorn Computers in the early 1980s, drobe.co.uk spoke to the film's producer, Andrea Cornwell, to find out more about the show - and now you can read our review of the film
The French newspaper Le Monde called them “timid and partial.” The British newspaper The Guardian referred to them as “sleight of hand.” The German newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau simply noted in a headline: “Obama disappoints the world.”
Fed chief Ben Bernanke has embarked on the most radical and ruinous financial rescue plan in history. According to Bloomberg News, the Fed has already lent or committed $12.8 trillion trying to stabilize the financial system after the the bursting of Wall Street's speculative mega-bubble. Now Bernanke wants to dig an even bigger hole, by creating programs that will provide up to $2 trillion of credit to financial institutions that purchase toxic assets from banks or securities backed by consumer loans. The Fed's generous terms are expected to generate a flurry of speculation which will help strengthen the banking system while leaving the taxpayer to bear the losses. It is impossible to know what the long-term effects of Bernanke's excessive spending will be, but his plan has the potential to trigger hyperinflation or spark a run on the dollar.
BETWEEN THE FOLDS chronicles the stories of 10 fine artists and intrepid theoretical scientists who have abandoned careers and scoffed at hard-earned graduate degrees—all to forge unconventional lives as modern-day paper-folders.
I’m not quite sure when the mainstream gay rights advocates adopted George W. Bush's "you are either with us or against us” mantra, became obsessed about exit polls, and started to believe that it's OK to marginalize people of color, but there we are.
A truism perhaps, but before resorting to brute force and open repression to halt the "barbarians at the gates," that would be us, the masters of declining empires (and the chattering classes who polish their boots) regale us with tales of "democracy on the march," "hope" and other banalities before the mailed fist comes crashing down.
Welcome! This is the main page for Biglumber, a site designed to help people sign each other's OpenPGP keys, by looking up cities around the world. Signing keys allows you to expand your web of trust, a very important part of using public key cryptography. Keys are not listed here until it has been verified that the email address for the key is valid and belongs to the owner of the key.
Boy Meets Boy is a young adult novel by David Levithan, published in 2003. It is set in a gay-friendly small town in America, and describes a few weeks in the lives of a group of high school students. As the title suggests, the central story follows the standard romantic plotline usually known as "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl" except that the main characters are both boys, the narrator Paul and newcomer Noah. The novel won a Lambda Literary Award.
In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia's human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the "unique features" of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power "which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war -- against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else's country".
Take the internet of things, add some creativity, some superfast broadband, and head to the seaside resort that’s become a poster child for digital innovation
A bright is a person whose worldview is naturalistic, that is, free of supernatural or mystical elements.* The term was coined by Mynga Futrell and Paul Geisert, a pair of brights from Sacramento, California, who thought it would be sensible to adopt a common name for atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, materialists, rationalists, secular humanists, and skeptics.* All these disparate groups share in common a naturalistic worldview.
While most attention on the aftermath of the Comcast decision has tended to focus on the decision’s impact on net neutrality and the implementation of the National Broadband Plan (NBP), the seismic wave from Comcast and its aftershocks could reach well beyond those obvious targets. Local TV broadcasters, in particular, might want to pay attention to how Comcast might play out in their corner of the regulatory universe.
If Obama means what he says, he would use his office as a bully pulpit to urge repeal the present harsh creditor-oriented bankruptcy law sponsored by the banks and credit-card companies. He would campaign to restore the long-term trend of laws favoring debtors rather than creditors, and introduce legislation to restore the practice of writing down debts to reflect the debtor’s ability to pay, imposing market reality to debts that are far in excess of realistic valuations.
Join scientists, artists and writers to discuss the interesting, the unusual or provocative in the past, present and future of science, culture and us, over a cup of coffee or drink.
The Camunni were ancient population located during the Iron Age (I millennium BC) in Val Camonica; the latin name Camunni was attributed to them by the authors of the first century. They are also called ancient Camuni, to distinguish them from the current inhabitants of the valley (the Camuni or Camunians). The Camunni were among the greatest producers of rock art in Europe; their name is linked to the famous rock engravings of Valcamonica.
These books serve as an introduction to various aspects and dimensions of free/open source software (FOSS) issues, including, FOSS in education, FOSS and government policy, localization, open standards and licensing.
All articles related to OmegaWiki. Ultimate Wiktionary is the project name for the development. Many people objected to the name and OmegaWiki was accepted by all people interested at the time as a big improvement.
Krishnan Guru-Murthy interviews Lord Andrew Turnbull, former head of the civil service about lavish hospitality invitations received by civil servants; and also about his view of the current banking crisis.
Two of the defendants in the Pirate Bay trial (#spectrial if you're following it on Twitter) gave evidence today in the case in a Swedish court. They said they don't read contracts they sign, don't check the speeches they write, and the law - well, what's the use of that?
Darwin was born 200 years ago, and 50 years later unveiled his theory of natural selection. To mark these anniversaries we bring you the definitive guide to the naturalist's great book, with extracts from key chapters and essays from leading scientists and thinkers including Richard Dawkins and former Bishop of Oxford Richard Harries
The Chora Church (Turkish Kariye Müzesi, Kariye Camii, or Kariye Kilisesi — the Chora Museum, Mosque or Church) is considered to be one of the most beautiful examples of a Byzantine church.
Today I attended an amazing presentation by Bernardo Huberman, director of the Information Dynamics Laboratory at HP Labs, titled “Social Dynamics in the Age of the Web”. Below the roughly editing notes I took during the amazing presentation. They are not intended to represent what Bernardo said but just to give you (me!) some pointers.