Hey! Bing is innovating! It has added social to search based on its relationship with Facebook. Oh wait, Google did that with Google+. So is this innovation or keeping up with the Joneses, err Pages and Brins? I thought this move by MS would happen faster given that FB and MS have been in bed [...]

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Take a look at this cover.

Now compare

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What is it with Brits and busts? Bentham asked that his head be preserved (and his body) as part of the auto-icon. I was listening to Wendy Brown’s lecture on Bentham and she reminded me of this oddity. As she explained, Bentham seemed to think that statues were less utile than a preserve body. The [...]

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Laura Heymann has a fun post on cease and desist letters here. It combines a little trademark fun, parental humor about commands to behave and eat certain foods (think greens). It’s a fun read for your weekend.

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Do you want everyone to know what book you read, film you watch, search you perform, automatically? No? Yes? Why? Why Not? It is odd to me that the ideas behind the Video Privacy Protection Act do not indicate a rather quick extension. But there is a debate about whether our intellectual consumption should have [...]

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The days of stopping someone from watching show X on a large T.V. but through and Internet device should be numbered. Google TV crashed. Fine, things fail. But the general blocking of content based on medium is a dying strategy. We are in stage 2 of the death of T.V., as we know it. [...]

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Like John Cusack in Better Off Dead when all songs seem to be about what is on your mind (see below), education seems to pop up everywhere I look right now. Well, why fight it? This link is to a host of online resources (HT: Esther Wojcicki). I listen to lectures while exercising. So far [...]

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Costs of education need to come down. Open course materials are growing. Maybe education will indeed undergo a transformation in the next ten years. There are many things that will need to change for true education reform to take place. But better resources matter. Enter Rice University. Its OpenStax College initiative tries to address the [...]

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Yes! You can now shotgun a beer with less trouble and mess than before. I saw an ad for the new Punch Top can by Miller Light and couldn’t believe it. The claim is that the new hole is for a “smoother pour.” (see the ad below). Come on. This innovation is about shotgunnig beer. [...]

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Andrew Morin and six others have argued for open access to source code behind scientific publishing so that the work can be tested and live up to the promise of the scientific method. At least, I think that is the claim. Ah irony, the piece is in Science and behind, oh yes, a pay wall! [...]

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Disclaimer of the future: A computer will grade your essay. You understand and accept that as you take this test. In other words, deal with it.
According to this release from Akron University “A direct comparison between human graders and software designed to score student essays achieved virtually identical levels of accuracy, with the software [...]

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The Boston Phoenix has an article about what Facebook coughs up when a subpoena is sent to the company. The paper came across the material as it worked on an article called Hunting the Craigslist Killer. The issues that come to mind for me are
1. Privacy after death? In may article Property, Persona, and Preservation [...]

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The song “Somebody That I Used to Know” by Gotye has been getting a ton of play on the radio around here (yeah I know, radio, how quaint, to which I say Radio is a sound salvation Radio is cleaning up the nation They say you’d better listen to the voice of reason … You [...]

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Calling China Mieville and Perdido Street Station fans. TechCrunch reports on Jarno Smeets, a man who wants to fly with wings, and he has done it! Apparently Wii and HTC devices are part of the invention. He had a test flight in January. And, as the video below shows, he flapped and took flight. I [...]

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Yes it is deep thoughts time. The grey lurks between the western hills and the narrowing finger of the south San Francisco Bay. Luckily my friend Norm sent this video to me.
Darth Vader? Good. Bag Pipes? Good. Darth and bagpipes put together with a guy in a kilt and on a unicycle? I leave that [...]

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Print is Dead. Long Live the Word. Britannica Stops the Presses. Welcome to the Henry Blake cliche festival. CNN Money reports that after 244 years the print edition of Britannica will no longer be offered. As many may recall, one study indicated the Wikipedia was more close to as accurate than Britannica. It may come [...]

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Julie Cohen’s Configuring the Networked Self is different and signals that the next era of tech policy is upon us. The explosion of books about the Internet tracks the explosion of, well, the Internet. Could there be a bubble here too? Are most books simply restating and rehashing arguments from years ago? Probably. Cohen’s book, [...]

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Back in October, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell explained the economics of video games as his company sees it. The Geekwire article is worth the read. For now, I’ll point out that he admits “We don’t understand what’s going on” and uses the language of co-creation of value, which I happen to believe is the current [...]

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OK, that title is a riff on a line from The Player. I loved it when the film came out and still do. It says so much of nothing, but captures a vibe that persists. Yet again it seems the film industry is in trouble, or rather doldrums. The Times reports that this year’s box [...]

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Some may remember Trading Places and the importance of the crop report on frozen concentrated orange juice to that movie. It turns out USDA commodities reports and their data are still important. For example, the Times reports that when the USDA decided to cut a program that produced “dozens of long-standing statistical reports on a [...]

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