In a seminal 1993 paper in American Scholar, “Defining Deviancy Down,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan reexamined an observation of Emile Durkheim, who helped establish sociology as a discipline, that crime was a “normal” function. By that he meant that the concept of crime helped define and reinforce social standards (“a punishment ceremony creates social solidarity”) and […]
Read more...Full disclosure: I am a longstanding and happy customer of Vonage, and would hate to seem them fail, particularly at the instigation of a Luddite and blantantly anti-competitive force like Verizon. I have also been suspicious of Verizon’s patent claims (the Patent and Trademark Office has had a recent bad habit of granting far reaching […]
Read more...The author of this essay, Paul Graham, has serious geek credentials. He co-created the first web-based application and also conceptualized a spam filter that is the foundation of most spam filters today. Graham’s point isn’t that Microsoft’s demise is imminent, but that members of the computer/development community are no longer afraid of it. And that […]
Read more...I have long wondered why business executives making serious decisions accept, even demand, such an imprecise and incomplete means of communication as a PowerPoint presentation. And I am not alone in that view. In fact visual information guru Edwin Tufte is even more critical: Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to […]
Read more...Sorry for the number of posts from the Financial Times today, but it happens to have stories no one else is carrying (yet). The FT tells us today that the EU has ordered Microsoft to hand over what the company calls “sensitive and valuable technical information about its Windows operating system for next to no […]
Read more...A story on the BBC website described the results of the latest Greenpeace assessment of the “eco-friendliness” of 14 electronics firms. What is interesting is that this sort of report, which used to be a media blip at best, now appears to motivate behavior, at least among some companies. Lenovo, which came out on top […]
Read more...Warning: It won’t be full featured, but the sound quality is apparently good. The question is who the target market is. People who worry about forgetting their phone? Those who like the James Bond (or perhaps Get Smart) factor? People who hate carrying things? That part remains to be seen: Once implanted in a person’s […]
Read more...This week’s Economist discusses “Plan B for global warming,” which is to implement measures directed at cooling the earth’s temperature. It’s an idea which is pragmatic (it acknowledges that collectively we aren’t likely to take concerted enough action to stop, let alone reverse, the rising levels of greenhouse gases that are producing higher temperatures). But […]
Read more...Not to worry, I have not become a creationist. But each era has had firmly held beliefs about how the world works that have been displaced by later theories. The article below is a mundane but nevertheless important example. Some Danish scientists have questioned the long-held belief that nerve signals are electrical, since electrical impulses […]
Read more...It’s generally good fun to see large companies have a go at each other in the press, but the latest one is not (yet) as gratifying as one might hope, mainly because neither player has landed a blow. In yesterday’s Financial Times (oddly the salvo was not picked up in the US until today, relatively […]
Read more...This is a fascinating little bit of analysis in, of all place, Mother Jones, where James Galbraith gives us “Bush’s Beltway Boom.” In it, he describes how the people at the top of the food chain (the top 1% that everyone is getting so upset about) has changed in the Bush years from the Clinton […]
Read more...No, I didn’t say that. Daniel Eran, in a post “Can Apple Take Microsoft in the Battle for the Desktop?” at his blog Roughly Drafted, did (it’s a heading to one of the sections of the piece). A few days ago I posted “The Sun is Setting on Microsoft,” and got a comment that, along […]
Read more...This attention-getting video clip is a bit of futurist forecasting, with emphasis on demographic and information technology-driven changes. I just wonder how poor old human beings, with our ape brains, are going to cope. Just consider the havoc created by one technological advance: cheap, reliable, non-intrusive birth control, as in The Pill. Forty years later, […]
Read more...It took the dinosaurs a long time to perish. Microsoft has a huge installed base and a ton of cash, so its demise is far from imminent. But Microsoft is becoming much less relevant. It’s an open secret that Vista is somewhere between a dud and a disaster. I have had friends who are not […]
Read more...Roland Piquepaille has a very good post on his Technology Trends blog, “Creating energy from wasted heat.” Although much of the news about climate change has been grim (both the severity of the situation and the lack of political willingness, at least in the US, to even admit there is a problem), it is important […]
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