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{ Category Archives } Social Impact

Thinkers you should know - danah boyd

Here’s a 14 minute video interview with danah boyd, who’s been working on a Ph.D. for the past several years at the Berkeley School of Information. She’s focused on understanding social networks and their interplay with youth culture. The video is an excellent introduction to her work. I’ve found her blog, Apophenia, a source of [...]

When does technology stop being technology?

I’ve frequently used Alan Kay’s definition of technology as “anything that was invented after you were born”. The following perspectives from the late Douglas Adams and from Bran Ferren are richer and perhaps more useful.
I found this material originally from Jenny Levine, The Shifted Librarian, who’s been following these issues for as long as I [...]

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Quechup is rotten: don’t accept invites

I got caught by one of these. My apologies to any of the (fortunately) small number of people in my gmail address book who might have been subsequently spammed by me.

Quechup is rotten: don’t accept invites

As blogged here yesterday:
While you were Burning / vacationing / spacing out offline this Labor Day weekend, [...]

More insights from Hans Rosling at TED 2007

Someday I will find a way to attend a TED conference. In the meantime, I hugely appreciate that they are making videos of the conference available to mere mortals. Hans Rosling returns for an encore to his 2006 performance (which I blogged about last year about this time) to offer new insights to be gleaned from statistics about health, [...]

Charles Stross on some possible futures

I’ve been a fan of Charlie Stross’s science fiction since I discovered it. Here’s a transcript of a talk he gave recently in Munich trying to tease out the potential implications in some pretty straightforward predictions about near-term technology change. As Larry Niven once observed, “Good science fiction writers predict cars: Great science fiction writers predict [...]

On the limits of intellectual property - Spider Robinson’s ‘Melancholy Elephants’

“Melancholy Elephants” provides powerful insight into the relation between an intellectual commons, the creation of news works of art, and the potential unintended consequences of perpetual copyright. It turns out that I’ve pointed to this story in the early days of this blog. It’s well worth reading again.
Spider Robinson’s Hugo-winning “Melancholy Elephants” online
Cory Doctorow: Spider [...]

Interview with Michael Wesch on his Web 2.0 video

Marc Orchant finds an excellent interview with Prof. Michael Wesch, creator of Web 2.0…The Machine is Us/ing Us.

Battelle interviews Michael Wesch - the web 2.0 video
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve seen the Web 2.0 video created by Michael Wesch, a professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University. It’s been [...]

Thinking about the larger context

 I found the following very helpful in my continuing efforts to understand global climate change.

The Human Hand in Climate Change
Kerry Emanuel (whose influential scientific work we’ve discussed here previously) has written a particularly lucid and poignant popular article on climate change for the literary forum “Boston Review”. The article is entitled Phaeton’s Reins: The [...]

FASTforward conference and conference blog

Got an email from Hylton Joliffe at Corante last week about the FASTforward conference and the opportunity to contribute to the FASTforward blog in advance of the conference. The topics are squarely within my interests and I’ve had some good experiences with FAST through my ongoing interactions with the folks at Traction Software, so it [...]

Measuring the speed of a meme

I found this little experiment while tracking down a new blog reference out of a magazine column that I was reading while waiting for my laptop to boot. Serendipitous enough? Not entirely clear whether I will ever visit either place again, but in the interests of research (however loosely defined) here goes.
Measuring the speed [...]