If you haven’t been following the issue of location privacy, The Government Can Use GPS to Track Your Moves is a good place to start. Do have a peek. The rest of the links are also of interest, of course, but only if you’re of the thinking sort.
Continue reading “Links”
Category: Links
Links
A bit fewer links this week, as I’ve actually managed to stick with the schedule and get these out on a Friday evening, rather than hoarding them until there are too many to really process. I hope that you enjoy them, and have time to peruse them over the weekend! An article not in the links, because it was shared with me, is Jon Carroll’s article, in which he puts a spotlight onto some of the location privacy issues brought about by FaceHook’s recent move to encourage users to share their geolocation with the world. It’s worth a read, I think, particularly if you’re not aware of the issue of geolocation privacy.
Enjoy!
Continue reading “Links”
Links
And another batch of links for you. The big thing this week has been the Google/Verizon negotiations with regards to Net Neutrality. As always, there are some really good reads in here, or at least I think so.
I’m trying to keep on top of these – not just reading them, but passing them along. Hope they’re of benefit.
Continue reading “Links”
Links
If you haven’t ever visited XKCD, I cannot recommend it more highly. Be sure to hover over the pictures, to get the little bit of snark which pops up with each one.
A few of my recent favorites are Workaround, More Accurate, Bag Check, Tech Support Cheat Sheet, and Idiocracy.
As usual, a batch of links, below. Enjoy!
Links
Another batch of links for your consumption.
Link
I’m going to throw this single link out there, because it’s so significant: Software will be unpatentable in NZ. Yes – you read that correctly. New Zealand has decided that patenting software (which is already subject to copyright law) serves only to stifle innovation, in particular because the world of software changes so rapidly. This is along the same lines as some U.S. Supreme Court decisions regarding patents; hopefully the rest of the world will get on board and clarify what is “an invention” (and therefore subject to patent law) as separate from what is “a creative work” (and subject to copyright).
This would mean that it is the source code which would be subject to the law (copyright), rather than the functionality itself. So, if a company copied code, it would be violating copyright. But, if a company developed something entirely separate from another company, that company would be safe: it hadn’t copied anything, it had merely developed something which did the same thing.
This is a major difference between patent and copyright, and will hopefully cut down on “patent trolls.” It also recognizes that source code is the “creative work,” rather than privileging the end product and the functionality.
-D
Links
For your enjoyment and enlightenment, another several weeks’ worth of links! There are some real gems in here, such as STEMing the Tide:
…
In high school, girls only take 17 percent of computer-science AP tests. They earn only 18 percent of computer and information-science degrees in college, and they make up just under a quarter of computer and math professionals.
…
A March report from the American Association of University Women found that female postdoctoral applicants have to produce 20 more papers to be judged as productive as their male counterparts.
…
During a conference Jemison organized to address the issue, a few of the (white, male) professors suggested something more radical: making funding for tenured professors contingent upon them making sure there are more women and minorities in their classes. “You want it done? Give it to them,” Jemison says. “Make them responsible for it … Right now they don’t have any skin in the game.” Putting the onus of turning things around on men rather than women is gathering strength among advocates for gender equality.
…
Enjoy reading!
Links
Yet another boatload of links for you all. If you don’t read anything else, think about whether deep reading suffers during the advance of technology. Of course, there are lots of good things buried in the links, but … well, you might be suffering from a lack of reading skills, due to technology.
On Links
A friend asked how I come up with these links, so I thought I’d share with you just what goes into this whole process.
I subscribe to 119 different RSS feeds, and I read them in Google’s Reader. To make the reading process most efficient, I’ve installed 2 GreaseMonkey scripts: Google Reader for wider screens, and Google Reader Absolutely Compact. These get rid of the frills and wasted space (and the stupid “like” button).
I go through usually by category (news, photography, food, etc.), popping things open in new tabs to read, then marking them with a “star” if they’re something to be shared out. Those things which get shared out are usually from the news category, which contains feeds from such sites as the Association for Computing Machinery, Der Spiegel, the SF Chronicle’s Technology section, and so on. (I had to abandon Science Daily, because the volume was simply too much to handle!)
After I’ve let things build up for about a week, sometimes two, I harvest all of my “starred items,” organize them into categories, and pop them into a post. I used to gather up all of the links manually, which was incredibly tedious. I wrote a little .php script to do that for me, though, and now can just deal with categorizing them, which takes some time as well. So, every day I probably read news feeds for about an hour, and once a week I spend another hour or so gathering and sorting.
The links I select are usually ones which I think would be of interest to my department, but I also try to get things which are simply important to the world (live in the US and wonder about volcanoes? USGS can tell you which to worry about!).
Happy Sunday!
-D
[The first photo is of Lord Kelvin, “Revolutionary Scientist.” The second is Che Guevarra, wearing the famous See You Jimmy Hat (Tam-o-Shanter) with attached “ginger locks”; this is probably making fun of both Che and The Tartan Army.]
Private Searching?
IxQuick is a search engine we’ve been using for about the past few months, rather than Google. Click the link to find out why. You just might like the idea.