#tech etc

[comradeoceanreads]

The Second of December, 2015 It is seven am when I wake up and I still hear the motor sounds. They are from all the motorbikes that had stopped under the flyover, full of water, trying to be revived. The water seems more sinister in daylight. Neck deep, chest deep and waist deep on all three sides. The side I had driven through the previous night is also flooded now. The rain has worked hard overnight. There is an entire community of stranded persons waking up that morning. Helpless, hungry and horrified. We bond.

Chennai is underwater —and America’s outsourcing chiefs should be worried

[comradeoceanreads]

It was like a mirror world to YouTube comments, where several dozen anonymous people had come together in love and harmony to write a complex, logically coherent document, based on a single tweet. Fan is a tool using animal. Maciej Cegłowski on what happened when fandom was forced to migrate from Delicious to Pinboard and he asked what his site could do better.

[comradeoceanreads]

Broadband finally covers most of the UK, but we could have had faster connections years ago… In 1989 Paddy Ashdown, then leader of the Liberal Democrats, proposed a nationwide fibre-optic communications network that would have revolutionised connectivity for businesses, universities and home users. The Conservative government rejected it as a ‘pie in the sky approach’ that there was no demand for and we were stuck with dial up until the turn of the century. But imagine if the Liberals – or the Lib-Lab pact – had won the 1987 election and delivered the investment in R&D that the manifesto promised to reach “the second industrial revolution, based on the sunrise technologies of micro-electronics, bio-technology and new materials”…

[comradeoceanreads]

If you still live in 2003 and have a Yahoo e-mail account but also use Ad Block to, ya know, block ads, then the folks at Yahoo might have a nasty surprise for you when you go to check your inbox.

Pinboard: 

Yahoo appears to be A/B testing locking users out of their email if they have an ad blocker enabled My take on this: Yahoo is just flexing its muscles and demonstrating it still has enough users to run an A/B test

[comradeoceanreads]

My pedagogy has always been student-centered, participatory, and interactive. While I am excited about the possibilities of digital technology to enhance historical research and reach broader publics, I am also interested in the potential of digital media as a way to engage students. Currently, I teach at a private liberal arts university focused…

[comradeoceanreads]

The idea that particular individuals drive history has long been discredited. Yet it persists in the tech industry, obscuring some of the fundamental factors in innovation.

“He no more produced the technological landscape in which he operates than the Russians created the harsh winter that allowed them to vanquish Napoleon.”

“A self-made billionaire, programmer, and engineer—as well as an inspiration for Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark in the Iron Man movies—” - scrap iron man

[comradeoceanreads]

John Snow points me to this post by psychology researcher Lisa Feldman Barrett who reacted to the recent news on the non-replication of many psychology studies with a contrarian, upbeat take, entitled “Psychology Is Not in Crisis.” Here’s Barrett: An initiative called the Reproducibility Project at the University of Virginia recently reran 100 psychology experiments …