13
Jan
Posted by Douglas in Atheism, Skepticism, Technology | Tags :Atheism, computer science, debugging, philosopy, sarcasm, Skepticism, software engineering | No Comments
A recent post by Jesse Galef at Unreasonable Faith about why skeptics seem predisposed towards sarcastic forms of humour got me thinking. The question was whether there was a causal link between deriving humour from being able to spot the things that are exaggerated or out of place and being able to spot the things that are similarly incorrect in a proposition (see The Hurley Model of humour as an evolutionary incentive). Jesse describes this as “debugging”, and so naturally I thought of a potential link to my own profession.
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23
Dec
Posted by Douglas in Technology | Tags :facebook, media, new media, rage against the machine, social, twitter, viral | 1 Comment
Killing In The Name Of is the UK’s Christmas number 1, taking the usual X-Factor mediocrity down a peg, at least temporarily. It ended up with just over 500k sales to win by 50k, and is the first single to claim the top spot through downloads only. It’s not a revolution on either point, though; what’s far more interesting is the nature of the Facebook (and later Twitter) campaign that got it there.
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12
Jan
Posted by Douglas in Technology | Tags :media, news, newspapers, print, Technology | No Comments
Over in the States, the print newspaper industry is in pretty dire straits.
Tribune Company, owner of the Chicago Tribune and the LA Times has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy, and the vultures are circling above a number of other papers (the Star Tribune and the New York Times seem to be the most prolific rumour victims). There are a myriad of factors in play here, the economic climate and the rise of internet news sources chief amongst them; however, what interests me more than the reasons for this decline is the impact of it. It has been said – correctly, in my view – that investigative journalism is crucial to a functioning democracy; however, speaking from my knowledge of UK media, I think the death of the print newspaper in favour of the internet can only be a boon to this.
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19
Apr
Posted by Douglas in Technology | Tags :business, change, innovation, Technology, tiscali | No Comments
You may have read recently that certain ISPs have claimed that the BBC’s iPlayer – for those that don’t know, a service that allows UK residents to watch BBC programming over their broadband connection – is crippling their networks, and the BBC should pay for the additional cost (read about it here). It’s another example of something I’ve seen a lot of businesses say recently – “my business is changing, someone else sort it out for me”.
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16
Jan
Posted by Douglas in Technology | Tags :education, Technology, wikipedia | 1 Comment
I recently read an article in The Argus about a university lecturer who has banned her students from using Google and Wikipedia while doing research for essays. To quote her, “Too many students don’t use their own brains enough. We need to bring back the important values of research and analysis.” While I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, somewhat unsurprisingly I disagree with the method.
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