Media & Tech
Turing's Enduring Importance
When Alan Turing was born 100 years ago, on June 23, 1912, a computer was not a thing—it was a person. Computers, most of whom were women, were hired to perform repetitive calculations for hours on end. The practice dated back to the 1750s, when Alexis-Claude Clairaut recruited two fellow astronomers to help him plot the orbit of Halley’s comet. 
Media & Tech 2011
The Web
Modelling behaviour: Game theory in practice
FOR a man who claims to lack expertise in the field, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, an academic at New York University, has made some impressively accurate political forecasts. In May 2010 he predicted that Egypt's president, Hosni Mubarak, would fall from power within a year. Nine months later Mr Mubarak fled Cairo amid massive street protests.The European: A study published around the advent of the railroad warned that traveling at speeds exceeding 30 km/h might harm the brain. The internet age is also relatively young – is it a danger to our mode of thinking? Carr: The fear of physical motion is very different than the internet’s affect on our tools of collecting and analyzing information; we need to look at the internet on its own merits.
Nicholas Carr | Information and Contemplative Thought - We Turn Ourselves Into Media Creations | The European Magazine
Illustration by Daniel Pudles We think we know who the enemies are: banks, big business, lobbyists, the politicians who exist to appease them.
Advertising is a poison that demeans even love – and we're hooked on it | George Monbiot | Comment is free
The new year is now well underway and many people have probably already broken the resolutions they made to disconnect from their digital devices more often and reconnect with the people and places immediately around them.
The Myth of the Disconnected Life - Jason Farman - Technology
Alan Turing: why the tech world's hero should be a household name
18 June 2012 Last updated at 00:27 GMT By Vint Cerf Turing Award winner / Chief internet evangelist, Google
Information explosion: how rapidly expanding storage spurs innovation
Moore's Law gets all the press. It's easy to present even to non-technical readers, and the way it's most often expressed is something like, "computers double in speed every year," though that's a bastardization of the axiom, which actually states that the transistor count of integrated circuits tends to double every eighteen months or so.The last two decades have completely transformed the way we know. Thanks to the rise of the Internet, information is far more accessible than ever before. It’s more connected to other pieces of information and more open to debate.
Are we on information overload?
Is Technology Destroying Your Relationships?
I walked in the door and the hostess of the party in the posh Venice Beach apartment rushed to greet me. She introduced me to the woman who'd walked in at the same time as a prolific sex writer who was going to write a steamy novel to dethrone Fifty Shades of Grey . I had no plans to do this, but that's the way of parties.The Age of the Viral Idea - Bill Davidow - Technology
Thought contagions, accelerated by the Internet, push economies to the brink, burst housing bubbles, and propagate unsettling, radical ideologies The Internet Age has brought with it a glut of contagions.
Instant messengers
Histories of momentous events are being written more rapidly. But does an increase in immediacy lead to a loss of perspective?You Say You Want a Devolution? | Style
Ironically, new technology has reinforced the nostalgic cultural gaze: now that we have instant universal access to every old image and recorded sound, the future has arrived and it’s all about dreaming of the past.There's more to digital music than MP3 and AAC files, as Neil Young recently reminded us. Here's why high-resolution audio is important. Neil Young made waves this week with some comments about digital music files—first at the Sundance Film Festival, and then later in an All Things D interview.
Why Your MP3s Sound Bad: High-Resolution Audio Explained
6 Terrifying User Agreements You've Probably Accepted
How many user agreements have you clicked through in your life without reading them? We're going to guess it's one for every single piece of software you've ever used, and every gadget, and Lord knows what else. You've probably signed off on thousands of pages of dense, unread legal jargon in your life.Energy & Sustainability :: Feature Articles :: February 27, 2012 :: :: Email :: Print