I didn’t know him personally, but I was saddened to read about Ilya Zhitomirskiy’s recent suicide. I have no personal insight into his situation, the sources of his stress, or what brought him to take his life. It’s tragic, full stop. As I was reading Gawker’s story on his death, I was struck by its implicit …
Continue reading Accepting Inefficiencies and Different Scales of Change in Networked Environments
You're a 16-year-old Muslim kid in America. Say your name is Mohammad Abdullah. Your schoolmates are convinced that you're a terrorist. They keep typing in Google queries likes "is Mohammad Abdullah a terrorist?" and "Mohammad Abdullah al Qaeda." Google's search engine learns. All of a sudden, auto-complete starts suggesting terms like "Al Qaeda" as the …
Analysis of yesterday's news coverage of the Mexican massacre Mexican Tweets More than fifty people were murdered yesterday in what is now the most violent episode in the ongoing Mexican Drug War. Most of the victims were women, some were pregnant. After learning about the horrific massacre in Monterrey, I spent several hours reading the …
Living in the US, I see signs of media piracy all the time. I have numerous friends who are unrepentant music/movie/TV/book pirates. And while I buy a surprising quantity of my media, I also pirate that which I cannot get due to international rights laws or due to foolish business decisions on behalf of media …
David Cameron has vowed to do 'whatever it takes' to restore order after the riots: this seems to include blocking access to social networking sites. "Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organized via social media," Cameron said. "And when people are using social media for violence we need to …
Continue reading Riots, social media, and the value of ‘first responders’
Everyone's abuzz with the "nymwars," mostly in response to Google Plus' decision to enforce its "real names" policy. At first, Google Plus went on a deleting spree, killing off accounts that violated its policy. When the community reacted with outrage, Google Plus leaders tried to calm the anger by detailing their "new and improved" mechanism …
Continue reading “Real Names” Policies Are an Abuse of Power
Developmental psychologists love to remind us that the frontal lobe isn't fully developed until humans are in their mid-20s. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for our ability to assess the consequences of our decisions, our ability to understand how what we do will play out into the future. This is often used to explain why …
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