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.
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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.
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.
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