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Society, Policy & Culture
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I Hate the News (2006)
Some people start their day by reading The New York Times . Others end it by watching the nightly news. Some get it from The Daily Show . Others download it from a variety weblogs. Some keep up-to-the-minute by following CNN. Others have instant news updates automatically text messaged to their phone. But everybody…
YouTube puts the final nail in the loudness wars' coffin
This is HUGE.
The Impact of “Blind” Auditions on Female Musicians (1997)
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
Stanford study shows success of different programming styles in CS class
The Graduate School of Education and the Computer Science Department engaged in a joint research project to advance new approaches to teaching.
Study: Teen Cannabis Users Have Poor Long-Term Memory in Adulthood
A new study shows that teenagers who had previously been heavy users of marijuana performed worse on long-term memory tests than those who never used cannabis, and they had abnormally shaped hippocampuses.
Paul Kalanithi, writer and neurosurgeon, dies at 37
Paul Kalanithi wrote essays for The New York Times and Stanford Medicine reflecting on being a physician and a patient, the human experience of facing death, and the joy he found despite terminal illness.
Wikimedia v. NSA: Wikimedia Foundation files suit against NSA
Today, the Wikimedia Foundation is filing suit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) of the United States. The lawsuit challenges the NSA’s mass surveillanc…
USB-C and Modular Smartphones Are the End-Game for Convergence
Two new technologies – the modular smartphone and USB 3.1 – are set to radically accelerate the convergence of everything to a single, in-pocket device. In fact, they are so revolutionary that they will change the entire way we think about mobile computing as the iPhone did earlier this millennium.
What a graph of 8,000 fake Twitter accounts looks like
Recently I've been plagued with Tweets saying that I'm "trending in London." As flattering as that is, it's not true. There appears to be a network of Twitter bots which are randomly repeating other people's tweets, ripping off avatars and bios, and generally causing a nuisance. Looking at the users' Twitter name, I…
We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards
The public sector is often seen as sclerotic and conservative in contrast with a dynamic and innovative private sector. This assumption lies at the basis of much of the outsourcing of public services to the private sector. In this interview and her new book, Mariana Mazzucato argues against this assessment and in…
Sexism in Tech: Don’t Ask Me Unless You’re Ready to Call Someone a Whistleblower
Sexism in tech is out of hand, and talking about it is risky business.
Elsevier sold me a Creative Commons non-commercial licensed article
[Update 2015-03-13: I have blogged further about this here and provided a recap here. This post has been viewed over 10,000 times. Clearly some people want to sweep this under the carpet and pretend this is just ‘a storm in a teacup’ but it did happen and people do care about this. Thanks to everyone […]
The time has come to stand up for the GPL
The Software Freedom Conservancy provides a non-profit home and services to Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects.
Seneca on the proper use of time
Yesterday I wrote about the impending death of the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks. I was particularly struck by this line from Sachs’ public goodbye
Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman
KAHNEMAN: Could you elaborate on these possibilities? I mean, what's the distinction between predicting and setting up a range of possibilities?
VMWare Taken to Court Over GPL Violation
Software Freedom Conservancy announces today Christoph Hellwig's lawsuit against VMware in the district court of Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany. This is the regretful but necessary next step in both Hellwig and Conservancy's ongoing effort to convince VMware to comply properly with the terms of the GNU General Public…
Google seems to have broken email forwarding
Basically: I'm finding it impossible to reliably convince Google that email from my employees, to my employees, is not spam. I run my own mail server, but most of my employees use Gmail. So I have forwarding set up: employee@dnalounge.com simply forwards to employee@gmail.com. When sending mail using their Gmail…
EFF to UN: You Need a Privacy Watchdog
EFF joined more than sixty civil liberties organizations and public interest groups from across the world yesterday in calling upon the world's governments to support the creation of a United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy. The special rapporteurs are independent experts...
Mozilla not accepted for Google Summer of Code 2015
As you may have already seen, Mozilla is not in the list of organizations accepted for Google Summer of Code 2015.People who have observed the list carefully may have noticed that