Episode39
From Technolotics
Contents |
Fear and loathing in single sex schools
- Review of data from across the world showed no evidence that single-sex schools were consistently better.
- Ability and social background of the pupils reason for their performance in school league tables.
- Success of single sex schools could be attributed to them creaming the best students.
- Situation occurs of co-educational school having a large gender imbalance containing the girls deemed unfit for the single-sex school.
- Is it natural to seperate boys and girls at school as is simply denies them the chance to interact? Hence stunting their social and personal development?
- An interesting study would be to compare the social skills of those from single and co-educational schools.
- Children go to school together up until the age of 11, why then seperate them?
Links
Social networking products that game the system.
- SalesGenius,
- Allows a salesperson to see exactly what you looked at and clicked on on their website after clicking on a link sent via email.
- The subsequent telephone sales pitch is then based on what they have learned by observing you.
- LinkedIn is a social networking site for jobs.
- It allows people to connect to strangers who may employ them via someone they do know who will vouch for them.
- Situation may occur where you are asked to connect people you don't know to one another, which can be socially awkward.
- Jigsaw allows one to trade business contacts almost like baseball cards.
- You get money or credits for submitting contact information which can then be used to buy contact information.
- Idea of trading your contacts or obtaining contacts merely to trade them for better ones is kindof creepy.
Links
Who's reading your email?
- New plans to scan e-mails for illegal images of child abuse.
- AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft, EarthLink and United Online have joined with the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to create new ways to safeguard children.
- First initiative is to create a database of images of child abuse and then process each to create a digital fingerprint.
- They will then monitor email attachments and images files sent over the networks in the hopes of spotting illegal images.
- Chances of false positives are quite high.
- Seems more of a token gesture rather than a real effort to stop the trading of images of abuse.
- Trading often happens on restricted servers with files encrypted and obfuscated to hide their true content.
- UK is moving towards forcing ISP's to put in place technical measures that will block customers from accessing websites identified by the IWF (Internet Watch Foundation) as containing illegal images.
- Interestingly the IWF has not a statutory body and has no legal powers.
- But it will have the power to block a website it considers unacceptable or illegal under current law.
Why would you oppose this?
- Another foot in the door of the total surveilence of email
- False positives - family snaps etc
- What other images will trickle into later versions the tracking algorithem - essentially anything illegal that is distinct enough to algorithmically analyse cheaply - any form of drug useage, or how about photos of you at a protest. But technology is never used for repression right?
- Look at the list of other things the IWF watch for
- things that may be banned at the ISP - copyright violations, peer to peer services (note - not just file sharing), mobile camera violence (happy slapping we think)
- Great UK firewall anyone?
Links
The Future of Futurism
- In 1976 Stefan Kanfer divided futurists into two groups:
- Neo-Malthusians are convinced that the world is going to hell.
- Cornucopians, in contrast, promise vast riches.
- Most futurists believe technology will empower the ordinary individual.
- Glenn Reynolds believes in a "comfy chair revolution" that will turn every consumer into a producer.
- John Robb believes that such empowering technology has the downside of also being available to terrorists, criminals etc.
- Philip Longman, believes "the comfy chair revolution" will strengthen the hand of fundamentalists worldwide. The forces of reaction will simply outbreed the secular world.
- Barry Lynn argues that the global supply chains we count on are too fragile to survive a major shock, be it natural disaster or terrorist attack or otherwise.
- Some things don't change, i.e. death and taxes etc.
- Good futurists take the constants into account and extrapolate on current trends.
- The author states that the Cornocopians have generally got things right.
- Rising standard of living: Not for all, gap in wealth between rich and poor has widened.
- the XBox as a Superintelligent robots: eh.. no.
- Vast Undersea cities: This may come true but not through design, more likely through rising sea levels flooding cities.
Links
Short Stories
New Defamation bill makes it harder to sue for libel
- The Irish Governments new defamation bill allows a defence of innocent publication to people providing the medium.
- The bill has been proposed and is due for debate in the Dail before being passed into law in November.
- ISP's could be liable if they exercise an editing role on a site as they would then have the opportunity to excise defamatory material.
- In the UK ISP's are absolved from liability over what at third party writes about another person online.
- The new legislation may well force ISP's to disclose the identity of bloggers and contributors to chatrooms so that the defamer can then be sued for everything he owns.
- All this means is that the ISP is less likely to get sued.
- You however will still be at risk for damaging someone's good name, even more so now they can find out who you are.
Links
Amanda Congdon leaves Rocketboom.
- Anchor of popular daily video blog Rocketboom Amanda Congdon leaves the show.
- She claims she was forced to by Andrew Baron her former partner in RocketBoom.
- Rocketboom released a statement stating she was no longer with them due to her wanting to move to a different part of the country.
- RocketBoom has catapulted itself to success,
- with 250,000ish daily viewers,
- distribution via Tivo
- and $40,000 per week in advertising revenue.
- How much of that is attributable to the anchor is debatable but future success may depend on finding a suitable replacement.
- Or maybe they will kiss and make up.
Links
US military turns to "blog analysis" for intelligence
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research, is currently funding a US$450,000 study that attempts to mine blogs for "invaluable help in fighting the war of terror."
- Some genius has come up with the idea of basing the relevance of a source by the number of hyperlinks to it. Someone contact the Nobel foundation.
- This of course is not at all like the method used by the world's largest search engine.
- System will allow warhawks to figure out what topics bloggers are talking about before it makes it onto Fox News.
