The following essay was written October-November 2010 and presented to a creative writing group in Vancouver, B.C. I have since then edited the piece to its current form. For printing reasons it is in PDF format: Print_this_document.pdf .L
Publishing, on this side of the digital divide, has become not only simple but automatic. Messages are copied from storage to storage. Everything is a printing press, and we are all writers – producers of texts. But then, what does it mean to be read? Write something and put it on-line. Within hours it has [...]
When people sometimes ask me why I am not on facebook, or some of the other social networking sites (despite the title, this test is general) I usually joke it away saying something like “oh, I know way too much computer science for that”; just implying that, well, I don’t like to share so much [...]
A recent PhD comic is a fun comment on something that I believe will become an important and serious topic of discussion in the science community in the near future (it has been going on for some time already). There are many parallels to open/free software and other on-line publications for instance. The crux for [...]
Yesterday, the news spread on the Net, and it stopped a bit. Did you feel it? Posts in forums and on blogs; no not on those blogs, on the ones read by people who make this thing float: Gary Gygax has passed away. For a few seconds, the internet trolls was kept at bay, and [...]
Google announced Knol a couple of weeks ago. It is an upcoming knowledge database, or encyclopedia, probably aiming to rival Wikipedia. Now, to start just a wikipedia clone would be futile, and Google knows this of course. Knol differs from Wikipedia on a few points though. The most important, or at least the most discussed, [...]
Såg på nyheterna i dag att en undersökning visat att folk med utländskt klingande namn ofta sorteras bort innan anställningsintervjuer och inte kontaktas för ofta. (Nyhetskälla: SVT.) Först och främst är det ju trist att det finns sådan diskriminering, och det skall bli intressant att se om forskarna bakom rapporten kan visa på några orsaker [...]
