Writer Nicholas Carr lit up the blogosphere with his recent Atlantic Monthly cover story, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," warning that Internet use might be hurting our ability to concentrate and contemplate. We explore what all that surfing and clicking might be doing to our brains.
It must be really tough being a stupid company on the Internet. Once you make a silly decision and it's out there, travelling via the Interwebs, you'll pay for it very dearly - and probably would be paying for it forever, as it is likely to become the first thing that customers discover about you on Google. We have a growing number of various consumer advocates blogs and online groups to thanks for that. The rise of Twitter has even compensated for the relative decline in the power of once very powerful blogs like The Consumerist - which have seen themselves somewhat silenced by the proliferation of aggressive "search engine optimization" services like ComplaintRemover.com, which remove / demote links to online complaints about companies and their products (or that Mother of All Complaints - their customer service). And still - blame it on social media, but almost every time I see a group of bloggers and social media guys take on a company that has made an outright stupid decision, they usually win. Not only because they are right, but because the company usually ends up paying much higher fees in publicity services to deal with a swell of the negative publicity - all embedded in the precious Google juice - than the losses it would incur from dealing with complaints from their conservative customers, who may want to restrict the publication of certain materials - be that photos of breast-feeding mothers or rankings of adult products.
This is the central platform for video lectures in any language and of any faculty worldwide. You are invited to add lectures or to edit the lecture descriptions. Use is open and free of charge, and will remain so.
Physics 8A: Introductory Physics - Fall 2007. Introduction to forces, kinetics, equilibria, fluids, waves, and heat. This course presents concepts and methodologies for understanding physical phenomena,
Wikipedia can be a great site when you need a quick reference on history, pop culture or even politics. But its reputation as an authoritative research resource is doubted by professors and other experts who deter students from quoting Wikipedia in their papers. One reason is that a lot of the information on Wikipedia is either incomplete or downright false. Because anyone can technically edit or contribute to Wikipedia, the site is vulnerable to hackers and vandalism. Sometimes, the blunders are serious libel cases which result in lawsuits; and sometimes, they’re just funny.
Young queer protesters gatecrashed the opening event of Manchester Pride 2008 in Albert Square. Pride had organised a balloon release by a group of 18 year olds (all of them white as far as I could see), in recognition of it being 18 years since the first August Bank Holiday event. However, as officials, the city’s tourist chief and Manchester’s Lord Mayor looked on, protesters surrounded the balloons, unfurled banners and waved placards in protest at the commercialisation of the city’s Pride, high ticket prices, low charity amounts and Pride's lack of inclusion.
I’ve already responded in another forum to Nick Carr’s essay, which I thought was very thought-provoking, if not entirely on target; I won’t repeat here what I said there. But in it you can see that I would disagree almost perfectly with Clay Shirky, who I want to respond to separately here.
Radley Balko has posted video of the SWAT raid on a Missouri home that he wrote about last February. This is the one where the Columbia Police Department busted in, fired seven shots at the family's dogs, and ended up recovering a small amount of marijuana ..
My name is Michael Sappir. I am an Israeli living in Leipzig, Germany, where I study linguistics. I am also a co-founder and alumnus of Sudbury Jerusalem, a Sudbury school in Israel, and currently a member of the Council of the European Democratic Education Community (EUDEC).
Today I attended an amazing presentation by Bernardo Huberman, director of the Information Dynamics Laboratory at HP Labs, titled “Social Dynamics in the Age of the Web”. Below the roughly editing notes I took during the amazing presentation. They are not intended to represent what Bernardo said but just to give you (me!) some pointers.