Source: here

Drawing examples from all over the Internet – including a certain iPhone app that you may have heard of – Zittrain raises some serious (and some seriously entertaining) questions about ethical and legal aspects of distributed human computing.

Source: here

Source: here

Source: here

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

If we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that — either now or in the uncertain future — patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

Source: here

The structure of The Known Universe is based on precise, scientifically-accurate observations and research.

And it’s rather beautiful too. [thanks Nat]

"Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" is a free e-Book that teaches you how to program in the Python programming language. Each chapter gives you the complete source code for a new game, and then teaches the programming concepts from the example.

"Invent with Python" was written to be understandable by kids as young as 10 to 12 years old,

Source: here

The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.

What’s my evidence for this? Here are a few examples involving three corporations — Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola and Chevron — that many critics of business love to hate, in my opinion, unjustly.

Source: here

What’s the upshot? It is not that there are no schools that beat the odds; rather it is i) that very few schools do beat the odds, few enough for us to wonder whether there is very much to learn from them, ii) that we don’t have any reason to think that the schools identified as beating the odds are actually doing so and iii) that we haven’t identified whatever schools are, actually, beating the odds.

Source: here

Let me explain a thing or two about humanists like me. There are legions of us who reach for our guns when we hear the word genome. That’s because we’re all too familiar with the history of eugenics, and we flinch whenever someone attempts an “evolutionary” explanation of Why Society Is the Way It Is; we suspect them, with good reason, of trying to justify some outrageous social injustice on the grounds that it’s only natural. Likewise, there are legions of us who clap our hands over our ears when we hear the term evolutionary psychology. That’s because we’re all too familiar with the follies of sociobiology, and we’ve suffered through lectures claiming that our species is hardwired for middle-aged guys dumping their wives for young secretaries and students (I sat through that lecture myself) or that men run the world because women have wide hips for childbearing, whereas men can rotate three-dimensional shapes in their heads (okay, that one is a mash-up of two different lectures).

Source: here

December 30th 2009 | Comments(1) | Asides on art books Brains culture evolution genes neuroscience storytelling

“Loneliness isn’t being alone, it’s feeling alone". In other words, it's not about having social contact but about feeling like you have meaningful relationships.

This feeling, it turns out, was increased or was more likely to occur when one person had contact with a person who already reported themselves to be feeling lonely.
…
The spread of loneliness seems to have its own particular characteristics. Women, for example, seem to be more susceptible than men. Also, the more lonely people a person knows, the more likely she herself is to become lonely. That trait distinguishes loneliness from something like alcoholism: Having an alcoholic friend increases your odds of becoming an alcoholic, but having three alcoholic friends makes you no more likely than having just one…

Source: here

I accept Morozov’s criticism of Here Comes Everybody. That book was about social media rather than politics—it was an imbalanced account of the arms race between citizens and their governments. However, even within the logic of the arms race, the easier the assembly of citizens, the more ubiquitous the ability to document atrocities. And the more the self-damaging measures which states take—like shutting down mobile phones networks—will resolve themselves as a net advantage for insurrection within authoritarian regimes. Net advantage, in some cases, is a far cry from the “just-add-internet” hypothesis, but it is a view that is considerably more optimistic about the balance of power between citizens and the state than Morozov’s.

Source: here

Clear processes are also essential for dealing with one of the hard realities of innovation: failure. In this context, innovation can be seen as analogous to baseball—a star player on offense is one who fails about 70 percent of the time.

As Otis’s Diehl puts it, “What’s important sometimes is not how a company deals with success but how it deals with failure. There is a sense in which the best innovators know how to reward failure, as oxymoronic as that may seem. An initiative that stretches an organization, that results in pushing back the boundaries of knowledge and of products—that’s something that companies have to find a way to acknowledge, even if it does not result in a breakthrough product or process.”

Indeed, the risk of failure may be the most frequent killer of innovation.

Source: here

Source: here

hours of fun

Source: here

The idea behind the project is to use commercially available ‘off the shelf’ computer games that have been built for entertainment and then retrofitted for education. By their very definition commercially available games (due to their high production budgets) tend to be more engaging and cheaper than games that have been build solely for education. The challenge is finding the right games that are suitable for use in the classroom.

Source: here

Source: here

Look to have a healthy view to me [via Phil McKinney]

Not a bad video to show some of the children. 

See notes under communication

Source: here