Quickhit: Professor Michelle Simmons, NSW Scientist of the Year
Professor Michelle Simmons has been named the NSW Scientist of the Year for her work in quantum computing.
Tech tip: Instapaper
For people who haven’t heard of it yet, Instapaper is a web application that turns web pages into an ebook for you.
The Ada Initiative: census and Q&A
I am in the process of co-founding a non-profit called the Ada Initiative, which is seeking funding to undertake advocacy for women. The Ada Initiative is focused on women in open technology and culture generally, which includes online activists, members of fandom, remixers, open source hackers and many others If you are interested, take our census or ask questions here.
Femmostroppo Reader (Scitech Edition) – December 7, 2009
Items of interest found recently in my RSS feed. What did I miss? Please share what you've been reading (and writing!) in the comments. “As you’ll see, very few commentators who jumped on the conspiracy bandwagon even before reading the e-mails managed to get it right. “ “Donation” and “Welfare” States – Interesting Jon Stewart [...]
Twitter is TEOTWAWKI: Tech Culture Wars
Tigtog has been blogging about how, contrary to Chicken Little predictions of electronic media being the end of literacy worldwide, children today are better writers than ever before. I was just watching this interview on “The Twitter Revolution”, Chuck Klosterman on Break Room Live. The interviewer’s critiques of Twitter: – With the amount of information [...]
Academia: Internet-Triggered Death of Civil Society Not Predicted
In this week of heightened Internet! Moral! Panic!, it’s worth a peek at whether the internet really is the creeping civil cancer that some believe it to be. The JCMC (Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication) is available in fulltext online. It can be a fount of wanky sociology-speak, of course, but it also comes up with [...]
The Great Firewall of Australia
[image source] So the government has, as planned back in Beazley times, decided that ISPs in Australia must now implement blocking of “pornographic and inappropriate” websites. Customers must opt out, rather than opting in, to a blocking system that is likely to be at least some of: slow, ineffective, expensive, and nonspecific. Labor reportedly hasn’t [...]
Friday Funnies: 24 spoof – Jack Bauer saving the day with 1994 technology
Found a YouTube version to replace the CollegeHumor direct embedding which broke the blog. (link in case the embedded Flash doesn’t work for you) Oh, the memories: maintaining a dial-up connection uphill both ways in the snow! H/T Pam at Pandagon. Related posts: Quicklinks: #socialmedia #erosion #storm #bust – oops here comes Jack Bauer Captain [...]
Opportunities squandered
JOHN Howard squandered the benefits of the $80 billion-a-year resources boom and wanted to be re-elected so he could retire, Labor leader Kevin Rudd said yesterday. Defining the choice facing voters in one of his last major speeches of the election campaign, Mr Rudd said that on Saturday voters would choose either the future under [...]
Non-sequiturs
I’ve just forgotten what I was about to blog. In the meantime: A few moments ago I accidentally stepped backwards on to my cat’s paw. She yowled and then leaped several feet around the corner, so that she could glare at me accusingly while holding her paw up at a pathetic angle. As I had [...]
Duh du jour: A cautionary tale.
[scene: a very quiet room.] Me: [thinks] Gosh, that’s a lot of drive noise. And it’s constant, not fluctuating. Whatever could be hammering the hard drive? * checks Activity Monitor, nothing unusual Me: [thinks] Is it the new external drive? * unmounts it * Me: [thinks] Nope, not that. * quits out of a pile [...]
One for the Albee aficionados
Those who don’t already know this trivia, anyway. Just listened to Edward Albee in a radio interview, and he said that when he originally sold the movie rights to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf to Hollywood, he asked who they had in mind to star. Bette Davis and James Mason. Wow. What might have been. [...]
Soundbites on YouTube
Politicians around the world are gingerly using YouTube to make policy statements, or maybe just to get their soundbites out there while avoiding having to have a press conference. Now some Catholic seminarians have parodied the Mac vs PC ads (which I already loathed anyway) to convey the Vatican’s doctrine on Natural Family Planning vs [...]
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