Of dependencies, complexity and what, if any, is our destiny.
The other day I was talking with colleagues about the way that we use tools to overcome our physiological limitations and, in particular, how we have begun to u...
Category: technology
Why did Congress create a postal service and how did talk radio come about?
Fascinating, brief and polemical history of public media – now mass media – in the U.S., from the postal service to radio then television, etc.
Insourcing term papers. (Yeah, another story on paper mills. It’s a trend.)
Yet again, a fascinating story on essay mills. This one challenges – albeit by anecdata – an assumption I’d made earlier about who is paying for the...
Schneier on paper mills, testing: the value of a diploma vs. the knowledge it assures.
Bruce Schneier: Fundamentally, [essay plagiarism] is a problem of misplaced economic incentives. As long as the academic credential is worth more to a student t...
Stuck in the 70s, 80′s, 90′s, 00′s: the iTunes Genius playlist generator can’t make associations across decades.
One of my favorite things about music is how clearly it adheres to the dialectical mode of thesis (let’s use more synthesizers!), antithesis (no, let̵...
Sony, 30 years of headphone music and psychoaccoustic tomfoolery in Wham!’s Everything She Wants
Josh Marshall notes that Sony is retiring the Walkman and what a revolution that product represents. I couldn’t agree more. Just now I was listening to Ev...
Your dog has been ringing for the last four hours. Please pick it up. Or, a smart collar and smartphone app product.
I think knowledge of how dogs work is not equally distributed (otherwise, why would Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer, be rich and famous?) However, knowledge of ...
Never mind the jet packs, here’s the diapers.com
You know you’re in the future when you read this in Businessweek: “They have sensors and they’re supposed to stop if they see you,” says...
Among the groups that regularly use science over faith: business. That’s worth celebrating.
As much smack as I talk about the business community, I prefer to side with organizations that invest in science rather than faith. Here are the headlines from ...
Taco trucks, Twitter and the next Apple tablet.
Yesterday I saw a group of working class Jose’s standing around a taco truck at midday eating lunch. There were four or five pickup trucks parked near the...
News as meat: raw vs. aged prime, ground vs. choice cuts.
Or, to fight commoditization, provide analysis. I pay to read The New Yorker because its reporters provide a service that is rare in the information marketplace...
Essay mills, outsourcing and black markets.
You know your higher education system is fucked when kids are spending $200 per plagiarized essay. Clearly, any kid spending that kind of money on an essay shou...
Are there two types of feedback for ads, click-through and click-off?
I’ve seen two electronic ads today I was happy to “reject”: one for a conspiracy video and the other for Meg Whitman. In the case of the forme...
A total guess on Pandora’s “random walks”.
My guess is that when you first launch a Pandora station it begins at the dead center of the Venn diagram created by all the people who have also endorsed/reque...
Imagining a movie about /b/, the other social network.
We’re weeks away from the release of a movie which chronicles the making of a popular social network. I am reading the Encyclopedia Dramatica and having a...
The promise of networked suburbs and shuttering college dropout factories.
Urban Legends: The hipper the city, the mantra goes, the richer and more successful it will be — and a number of declining American industrial hubs have t...
Are Bansky’s graffiti examples of augmented reality?
An example of a Banksy intervention (graffiti!) that introduces a new meaning by changing the visual interpretation of a physical space.
The iPod Nano and augmented reality.
While likely to get some kids jumped, the new iPod Nano is a brilliant step towards augmented reality. Note how yesteryear’s band buttons have now become ...
Like “Rock Band” for the “Dog Whisperer” set.
A video game that captures not just your movements but also those of your dog. Fun for the whole family. Come on, Kinect developers, let’s see what you...
The “got it” rule for passing and AI chess.
My friend Matisse E. taught me a great trick: when you’re carrying something heavy and you are going to hand it over to someone else, you don’t let ...