OH HAI SEXISM · charlesarthur · Storify
why aren’t there more women in technology? Hmm, let’s see if Twitter can help us find out.
iPad Review: Apple’s Third-Gen iPad May Be the Last One That Matters
An Apple iPad has never looked so awful. No, I’m not referring to the new iPad, the one with the ballyhooed Retina display. I’m referring to last year’s iPad 2, whose screen now looks grainy and pixelated when viewed alongside Apple’s latest tablet. The improvement in display quality smacks you in the face as soon…
Retracting “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory” | This American Life
We’re horrified to have let something like this onto public radio. Many dedicated reporters and editors – our friends and colleagues – have worked for years to build the reputation for accuracy and integrity that the journalism on public radio enjoys. It’s trusted by so many people for good reason. Our program adheres to the…
‘Google is now an ad company’: Departing exec James Whittaker’s Goldman Sachs-style rant
Whittaker says that CEO Larry Page, who took over the company from Eric Schmidt, had a focus on ‘beating’ Facebook in advertising – which led the company to shift its focus from established products such as Google Mail onto its controversial social network Google Plus and other ‘social’ products built for advertising. –via ‘Google is…
Encyclopedia Britannica Halts Print Edition
My parents bought the 1976 edition, which came in a concise Micropedia and a more detailed Macropedia. We owned both. I remember using them to help flesh out last-minute homework assignments, but I have stronger memories of looking up topics like the psychological development of teenagers, acne, puberty, etc. The Encyclopedia Britannica has announced that…
How Cheap Should Books Be?
Why would Apple have agreed to pay higher prices for books while Amazon was still out there hocking them below cost? Good question. Those curious circumstances are why some, including Justice it now appears, think there might have been collusion on the part of the publishers. The European Commission opened its own formal investigation into…
Five Leadership Lessons From James T. Kirk – Forbes
Both Spock and McCoy are frequently at odds with each other, recommended different courses of action and bringing very different types of arguments to bear in defense of those points of view. Kirk sometimes goes with one, or the other, or sometimes takes their advice as a springboard to developing an entirely different course of…
Who Decides What Gets Sold In The Bookstore?
I just found out that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography. Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: “Multiple links to Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) store.…
Why Atari’s Pong Indie Developer Challenge is bad for developers
Atari’s Pong Indie Developer Challenge seeks to get all entrants to give away game ideas to Atari that Atari can then exploit, and the entrant relinquishes all further interest in the idea. Atari then selects 20 “semi-finalists” to put months of work into building out their ideas into playable versions that Atari has full ownership…
The Mounting Minuses at Google+ – WSJ.com
Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage. via The Mounting Minuses at Google+ – WSJ.com.
Facebook can be used to predict academic success, job performance | ZDNet
A good example of correlation. (Simply changing your Facebook content won’t automatically make you a better worker or student, but certain Facebook details do correspond to achievement in the offline world.) Researchers spent about 10 minutes looking at photos, wall posts, comments, education, and hobbies on Facebook profiles, while answering personality-related questions including whether the…
Gamasutra – News – Second Life developer acquires experimental game studio LittleTextPeople
LittleTextPeople, founded by writer Emily Short and Maxis veteran Richard Evans, has so far focused on the development of software that replicates complex social interaction. For instance, among its internal technology is a simulator that models social behavior and individual personalities. —Gamasutra – News – Second Life developer acquires experimental game studio LittleTextPeople.
Twitter / Search – “couldn’t remove your contacts” – All Tweets
Twitter / Search – “couldn’t remove your contacts” – All Tweets.
How iPhone Apps Steal Your Contact Data and Why You Can’t Stop It
Nothing really new in this article, but it’s useful to be reminded of how valuable our data is to those who want to make money off it (without our permission). Apple allows any app to access your address book at any time—it’s built into the iPhone’s core software. The idea is to make using these…
10 Ways Being a Theatre Major Prepared Me for Success | Wayfarer
I was not a theatre major, but I did have various paid jobs in my college theatre department, including working in the scene shop, painting billboards, writing press releases, etc. Nothing excites my 9yo daughter like acting. On her one day off between her last two shows, she built a sock puppet theater out of…
The Love Song of J. Alfred Proofreader
Was it worthwhile, Throwing off my shawl, Turning toward the writers to say: “That is not it at all, That is not what you meant, at all”? They thought me Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse. They just wanted to dish about Johnny Depp on the loose. I grow old…I grow old… But…
Hollywood Edition « Aaron Klein
Since they’re so persnickety about licensing agreements, let’s amend all of our terms of use to require all movie moguls to use a special “Hollywood Edition” of our products. Here are some of the special new features we’ll be giving them… Before you can do a Google search, you have to sit through five minutes…
Apples Textbooks For 1-percenters Will Leave Most Children Behind | Fox News
Publishers who want to create titles for Apple’s iBooks store must use Apple’s iBooks Author application, which runs on Mac OS X only. Publishers who use Windows or Linux computers in the office need not apply. If you want to create EPUB books, you can get software that runs on any platform. Just as with…
The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author EULA
Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I…
What Comes before the Platform: The Refuse of Videogames | Play The Past
It takes a digital humanist to make this kind of argument. I don’t mean to invoke the turf-fencing debate about what the digital humanities means, I mean to honor a question that forces us to remind ourselves that we are the Eloi, the pampered elite whose world of comfort exists only because of the toil…