MachineMachine /stream - tagged with facebook http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com Digital tools 'to save languages' http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17081573/bbc-news-digital-tools-to-save-languages Digital tools 'to save languages' http://t.co/Lsxwg8Bm ]]> Sat, 18 Feb 2012 18:35:37 -0700 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17081573/bbc-news-digital-tools-to-save-languages The Great Tech War Of 2012 http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/160/tech-wars-2012-amazon-apple-google-facebook And as every sci-fi nerd knows, you totally need a tricked-out battleship if you're about to engage in serious battle. To state this as clearly as possible: The four American companies that have come to define 21st-century information technology and entertainment are on the verge of war. Over the next two years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will increasingly collide in the markets for mobile phones and tablets, mobile apps, social networking, and more. This competition will be intense. ]]> Mon, 17 Oct 2011 12:25:13 -0700 http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/160/tech-wars-2012-amazon-apple-google-facebook The Cyberspace Real (Between Perversion and Trauma) http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-cyberspace-real Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio) justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations, unconstrained by any symbolic Law or by any impossibility of some Real? If not, how are we to detect in cyberspace the contours of the other two dimensions of the Lacanian triad ISR, the Symbolic and the Real? As to the symbolic dimension, the solution seems easy — it suffices to focus on the notion of authorship that fits the emerging domain of cyberspace narratives, that of the "procedural authorship":… ]]> Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:33:41 -0700 http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-cyberspace-real How to survive the age of distraction http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-to-survive-the-age-of-distraction-2301851.html The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks, with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It's being chewed by the e-book. It's being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It's hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.

In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter… ]]> Sat, 25 Jun 2011 05:21:36 -0700 http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-how-to-survive-the-age-of-distraction-2301851.html Is Twitter writing, or is it speech? Why we need a new paradigm for our social media platforms http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/06/is-twitter-writing-or-is-it-speech-why-we-need-a-new-paradigm-for-our-social-media-platforms/ Which begs the question: What is Twitter, actually? (No, seriously!) And what type of communication is it, finally? If we’re wondering why heated debates about Twitter’s effect on information/politics/us tend to be at once so ubiquitous and so generally unsatisfying…the answer may be that, collectively, we have yet to come to consensus on a much more basic question: Is Twitter writing, or is it speech?

Twitter versus “Twitter”
The broader answer, sure, is that it shouldn’t matter. Twitter is…Twitter. It is what it is, and that should be enough. As a culture, though, we tend to… ]]> Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:19:30 -0700 http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/06/is-twitter-writing-or-is-it-speech-why-we-need-a-new-paradigm-for-our-social-media-platforms/ Our data, ourselves http://articles.boston.com/2011-05-22/bostonglobe/29571858_1_data-privacy-public-health Who owns the data in that cloud has been the subject of ferocious debate. It’s not all stored in one place, of course — our lives are tracked and documented by a diffuse assortment of entities that includes private companies like Google and Visa, as well as governmental agencies like the IRS, the Department of Education, and the Census Bureau. Up to now, the public conversation on this kind of data has taken the form of an argument about privacy rights, with legal scholars, computer scientists, and others arguing for tighter restrictions on how our data is used by companies… ]]> Mon, 30 May 2011 15:11:01 -0700 http://articles.boston.com/2011-05-22/bostonglobe/29571858_1_data-privacy-public-health The Web Means the End of Forgetting http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html When historians of the future look back on the perils of the early digital age, Stacy Snyder may well be an icon. The problem she faced is only one example of a challenge that, in big and small ways, is confronting millions of people around the globe: how best to live our lives in a world where the Internet records everything and forgets nothing — where every online photo, status update, Twitter post and blog entry by and about us can be stored forever. With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook… ]]> Sun, 25 Jul 2010 07:15:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age http://bostonreview.net/BR35.3/morozov.php In 2006 Stacy Snyder, a 25-year-old student at Millersville University in Pennsylvania, was denied a teaching degree just days before graduation. University officials had discovered a photo of her, captioned “Drunken Pirate,” on MySpace. The photo showed Snyder wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, and the university accused her of promoting underage drinking. As Viktor Mayer-Schönberger tells the story in his new book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Snyder lost control over the photo when it was indexed by Google and other search engines: “the Internet remembered what Stacy wanted to have… ]]> Sun, 13 Jun 2010 23:59:00 -0700 http://bostonreview.net/BR35.3/morozov.php Super-Kamiokande Particle Detector http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelpgh/4163374040/

M*Pgh posted a photo:

Super-Kamiokande Particle Detector

I follow ... where my mind goes...

Wikipedia:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Kamiokande

and official Super-Kamiokande site:

www-sk.icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp/sk/index-e.html

]]> Sun, 06 Dec 2009 08:47:00 -0700 http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelpgh/4163374040/ Is the Internet melting our brains? http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/09/19/better_pencil/index.html By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil. Such sentiments, in the opinion of Dennis Baron, are nostalgic, uninformed hogwash. A professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Baron seeks to provide… ]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:01:00 -0700 http://www.salon.com/books/int/2009/09/19/better_pencil/index.html