Internet
bioephemera | January 28, 2010Virtual reality trailblazer Jaron Lanier has a somewhat curmudgeonly, critical new book out called You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. Here's an excerpt:
If you want to know what's really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of to musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than with truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless. The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea…
cagapakis | January 27, 2010I sort of love the "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON" posters that have become the darling of interior decorating bloggers and graphic design jokesters alike in the past few years. I even have one of the posters hanging in my apartment. Then I saw Merlin's version.
At first I LOLed, and then I was like "huh." How did we get here? How did this meme evolve from stoic World War II propaganda to hilarious Richard Dawkins jokes?
And thus, the phylogenetic tree of "KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON" posters was born:
High res here.
grrlscientist | December 5, 2009tags: shocking news, Expat Life, wireless internet
Image: FunToosh.
Shocking news, everybody!
No seriously, I have some shocking news for you: I FINALLY have internet access from my beautiful flat (otherwise known as the peregrine's nest, since it is perched on the 13th -- top -- floor of the building overlooking the city and is inhabited by two peregrinating humans).
It only took a few weeks' wait (while I was here), before the router was installed (a process that took an engineer a mere 20 minutes to accomplish), and then it took another four days, two dozen phone calls, two scientists…
mikethemadbiologist | November 5, 2009Over at BoingBoing, we read about the leaked version of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a copyright treaty (so much for the Obama Administration's commitment to transparency. Maybe it's something in the White House water?). Two items caught my eye:
â¢That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet -- and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living -- if one member is accused of copyright infringement…
mikethemadbiologist | October 5, 2009I realize that much of the political establishment, particular on the right, has adopted the Peter Pan philosophy of public policy: anything's possible, if you wish hard enough. Consequently, too many Americans think that our infrastructure is not only fine, but the best in the world. This, I think, has made it much harder to convince people to support the stimulus package--which should have been called a rebuilding package. But two news items underscore how the pie-in-the-sky way of thinking isn't sufficient for rebuilding a nation. On the internet front:
The report by the…
grrlscientist | September 1, 2009tags: facebook, twitter, internet, technology, cyber stalking, Onion News Network, ONN, humor, satire, fucking hilarious, streaming video
There are times when I am grateful for having been shunned by my family since the age of fifteen: Christmas being the most notable among them. But the Onion News Network reminded me of yet another reason to be happy I don't have to deal with them: Facebook and Twitter! In this streaming video, 'E-Mom' Gloria Bianco shows Jim and Tracy how geographical distance is no longer a roadblock to shamelessly interfering with the lives of your children.
edyong | August 24, 2009Our minds are battlegrounds where different media fight for attention. Through the Internet, desktops, mobile screens, TVs and more, we are constantly awash with headlines, links, images, icons, videos, animations and sound. This is the way of the 21st century - a saturated sensory environment where multi-tasking is the name of the game. Even as I type these words, my 24-inch monitor displays a Word document and a PDF side-by-side, while my headphones pump Lux Aeterna into my head (see image below).
You might think that this influx of media would make the heaviest of users better at…
grrlscientist | August 21, 2009tags: Personas, Online Personality, Online Information, technology, art
GrrlScientist Personas [larger view]
Personas is an interesting program that searches for online references to you and uses it to create a piece of art that describes you. To do this, it analyzes these references for repeated words and phrases and builds a graphic (like the one you see above) that "describes" you. It's really interesting because you can watch the process as it builds this picture and gives you some food for thought regarding the sorts of information that is "out there" about you. It's almost as…
revere | August 8, 2009We're communicating through the marvel of the internet, you and I. Obama figured out how to use it to advantage and McCain didn't. Maybe it's a generational thing. At any rate, at this moment in history, any party that doesn't learn from history is bound to be history. Any Party like the Republican Party. Their preferred mode of communicating is via the Echo Chamber of far right talk radio and websites. Democrats have figured out how to use technology more creatively -- creative in the sense of creating people who agree with their positions. Instead of scaring the living crap out of people or…
mikethemadbiologist | July 21, 2009One of the parts I liked about Unscientific America was the recognition that many scientists need to be trained in communication--and as importantly, this training requires funding, so universities have a financial incentive to reward scientific communication and outreach. Mooney and Kirshenbaum also think that non-profit organizations should and will play a critical role in communicating science: not only do we have to train people, we need to actually pay them to communicate. So that's all good (TEH RELIGIONISMZ!! AAAIIEEE!!!).
One example of the non-profit model is Rick Weiss, who is an…
revere | July 16, 2009I spend a lot of time at a computer keyboard typing about biological viruses like influenza A, but computer networks are also subject to self-reproducing parasites of one kind or another and we continue to have a layperson's fascination with those organisms, too. I say "organisms" because try as I might, I can't figu®e out any criteria that distinguishes them from the carbon-based ones we mainly write about here. But that's another topic. This post is about yet another kind of harmful parasite, right wing politicians with only a couple of neurons firing, one of which they are using to…
mikethemadbiologist | April 15, 2009Or maybe not. By way of ScienceBlogling Ed Yong, I came across tweenbots, which are little robots that can only travel in one direction, and...well, just watch the video:
So I wanted to see what else tweenbot inventor Kacie Kinzer came up with. While I like the Morgen, it is the Whisper Jar that strikes me as particularly neato:
Whisper jars are magical containers for secrets. Whisper something into the jar, close the lid, and your secret will be contained until someone else comes along and opens the jar. When they do, the secret escapes-- is repeated once for one person to hear-- and then…
mikethemadbiologist | April 13, 2009So I recently joined Twitter. So here's some random thoughts about it:
De facto blog aggregator. It's actually a good substitute for an RSS feed, and because it's very low cost for someone to recommend a post (i.e., they don't have to blog about it), it's a really good way to be exposed to posts by people whose blogging you find interesting.
Blog aggregation isn't enough. If all your feed is your blog or business feed, I'm not interested either.
You can Tweet too much. My rule for adding people is that I look at their feed. If there's too many tweets (>~8/day), I usually don't add…
bcohen | April 1, 2009Add this to the list from my prior post: a Locavore app from Enjoymentland, available at the iTunes store. Local agricultural advocates are already using social networking and building virtual marketplaces and identifying market and farm sites nationwide. This feature extends the connection between on-line consumer practices and local food advocacy. Two of my students bought it and are giving it a test run. I'll try to get an update a few weeks into this Spring season.
According to the guy at Enjoymentland who made the app, the iPhone feature does this:
* Automatically detects which…
mikethemadbiologist | March 27, 2009...that is the question--along with some thoughts about being a blogger and not a writer.
I've been asking other science bloggers if I should start using Twitter. The answers have ranged from the formation of a blood pact sworn to never (EVAH!) use Twitter to a belief that Twitter 'communities' are the equivalent of a meta-hive mind and The New Frontier of Consciousness (the moderate view is that it serves as a combination notepad and blog aggregator which seems pretty useful actually). The downside is that I don't need another time sink. Which brings me to a couple of thoughts about…
bioephemera | March 19, 2009
Illustration by David Parkins, Nature
Today, Nature released a news feature by Geoff Brumfiel on the downturn in mainstream science media. We've all known that this is happening; the alarms become impossible to ignore when Peter Dysktra and his team at CNN lost their jobs last year. For mainstream outlets like CNN or the Boston Globe to cut science may seem appalling - but in an unforgiving economic climate which has already triggered the collapse of major newspapers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, such cuts are logical, because science reporting isn't a big money-maker. The question…
mikethemadbiologist | March 8, 2009This little security breach and its cause are disturbing (italics mine):
A Cranberry company that monitors peer-to-peer file-sharing networks discovered a potentially serious security breach involving President Barack Obama's helicopter.
Tiversa employees found engineering and communications information about Marine One at an IP address in Tehran, Iran.
"We found a file containing entire blueprints and avionics package for Marine One, which is the president's helicopter," said Bob Boback, CEO of Tiversa.
The company told Target 11 that it was able to trace the file back to its original source…
purepedantry | February 27, 2009There are some people who argue that the Internet increases the size of people's social networks by lowering the transaction costs of interacting with people.
Facebook -- as a dataset -- is handy for determining whether this is true. Everyone on Facebook has friends with whom you communicate on a regular or irregular basis. Therefore, it could allow you to quantify the size of social networks on the Internet.
This is precisely what Cameron Marlow, a sociologist at Facebook, did at the prompting of the Economist.
Marlow looks at the size of social networks on Facebook in terms of friend…
revere | February 1, 2009I like newspapers and we subscribe to two dailies at our house. But in truth I find myself reading the news online, not in dead tree form. We all know the newspaper business is in big trouble. Which is why there is something just a little creepy about this 1981 news story on San Francisco TV station KRON (hat tip Boingboing):
revere | January 13, 2009Whenever you read about some high profile drug company trial where the smoking gun is some incriminating email, do you shake your head and wonder, "How could they have written that in an email?" There are two ways for a drug company to protect itself from being nailed by these kinds of emails. The best is not to do things that if written anywhere would incriminate them. The other way is to teach your employees not to leave documentary evidence of your company's misdeeds. Guess which route the drug companies are taking?
Want to avoid those embarrassing internal emails containing concerns that…