Fascinating interview with telecommunications expert Susan Crawford on Bill Moyers’s show. The gist: public access to ubiquitous high-speed internet is being strangled by a lack of competition and oversight. A petition to support the appointment by the president of Susan Crawford as chair of the FCC is circulating now. After watching this video, you better […]
Great post in the New York Times Opinionator. “The ‘Busy’ Trap” looks at what we’re really doing when we overbook and overlook the most important interactions in our lives. A key graf: Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work. […]
The notion that a third political party could emerge in American politics — occupying some kind of radical center that combines the “best” positions of both parties while dispensing with their posturing and gamesmanship — is the chimera of modern political conjecture. Looking for this party’s arrival on the horizon is like squinting into the […]
In the firestorm surrounding Rush Limbaugh’s recent deplorable comments regarding Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, less if any attention has been paid to what he actually meant by them. This is understandable — his words were cruel, unfair, incendiary, and hearkened back to an era of misogeny to which most Americans long ago bid ‘good […]
When it comes to perceptions about its respect for user privacy, it’s been a rough month for Google. The roll-out of its new privacy policy consolidation was widely characterized as a “controversial” threat to users’ personal information — one even worthy of congressional hearings. Then a Stanford researcher discovered that Google was circumventing privacy settings […]
The news today that the world population has hit 7 billion is challenging to process. NPR.org makes it more intelligible with this video showing how that population has changed over time in different regions of the world. I love visualizations like this, that take something so mind-bendingly complex and make it so simple and […]
Last week, Google unveiled its much-anticipated social networking platform Google+ (pronounced “Google Plus”). Clearly Google wants to compete with Facebook in this sphere. A lot of details need to be ironed out before we know how successfully it will do so — including at what point people will actually get to join the service — […]
President Obama cracks a pretty good robot joke while announcing his new robotics initiative:
…or greatest newspaper correction? From the 5/9/11 edition of the Washington Post’s Express metro newspaper.
Walked to the metro this morning, my head swimming in 10 hours of news and analysis about the demise of Osama bin Laden. The friendly man who hands out the Washington Post’s Express at the top of the escalator handed me my daily copy, and I opened it curious to know whether the news had […]