The Irish apparently do not like freedom of speech. Everyone will be subject to the same restriction to prevent speech that might actually criticise beliefs or encourage people to think for themselves, that British broadcasters are already subject to. At leas in Ireland it is the courts that have the final say, in Britain it is Ofcom and the completely unaccountable bureaucrats at the IWF
I cannot decide whether I am more shocked by the news that the police are relying on Wikipedia, or the bad English in this discussion of it (more of the comments that attempt to use the word “credible” get it wrong than get it right).
Here is an example. It is readable (even if you skip the calculations), explains the argument for expecting a strong recovery, and why it may not happen.
The usually intelligent Willem Buiter has written a great example of the irrational hatred that Google seems to sporadically evoke. He attacks them with a list of charges, all of which are easily refuted.
Many people have called the recent Pew Research Centre poll that “showed” that only 26% of Americans believed in evolution. What is really scary is that no-one seems to have looked closely enough at it to see that it showed nothing of the sort.
…just in case you missed it (I did till today).
The Guardian was fooled by an elaborate hoax into claiming that NASA conducted experiments on sex in space.
They believed the story because they got the claim from a “respected French scientific writer”, Pierre Kohler. Neither he nor Jon Henley (the Guardian journalist responsible) actually thought of doing some of the proper fact checking.
As a few people arrive at this blog searching for information related to Galle, it is worth mentioning that I have done a website for my daughter’s school: The Thomas Gall International School, Galle.
Update, Sept 2012: That website is no longer up, as the school failed to renew the domain name. I believe they have plans for a new site.
Update, April 2015: My daughter moved to another school some time ago as well.
Alan Patrick has a rather dismal take on mainstream news media’s loss of audience to bloggers. I am considerably more optimistic: I think Alan both over-estimates the quality of newspapers and TV news, and under-estimates the quality available from blogs.
We all know newspapers are slowly dying. Competition from the internet may be one cause, but newspapers hardly help themselves by simply being so bad. The Guardian has a great example in Zoe William’s whine about how her baby is more affectionate towards his father than to her.
The Wall Street Journal seems to have been completely fooled by telecoms spin-doctors into claiming that Google, and other prominent advocates of net neutrality, have changed their views.
It has often been said that the internet is hard to censor because “it treats censorship as a defect and routes around it”. This could not be more wrong, the internet is the easiest medium to censor.
I have always had doubts about how well IT is, or even can, be taught in schools. It seems to reach its very worst in the case of a teacher who confiscated a pupil’s property to prevent them learning about a technology the teacher seems to have some sort of ignorant grudge against.
I have written a small lightweight pure TCL web server called Dandelion — because it is small and light, like Dandelion seeds, and I am no good at thinking up names (its a better name than GIMP though, and that has been pretty succesful!).
Download the Dandelion server: dandelion1.0.zip, or dandelion1.0.tar.bz2.
A discussion about why Linux has been so slow to take off made be realise that, essentially, Windows is like cola, Linux is like fruit juice. Its marketing that matters.
New research provides more evidence that people simply are not rational in choosing what they buy, a fundamental assumption of economics. I have previously discussed problems including consumers inability to understand many products.
Halliburton (it would be) have patented an aspect of patent trolling: reverse engineering other people’s trade secrets using a patent, patenting the (former!) trade secret and then suing the original inventor.
Adam Williamson thinks that Ubuntu has been destructive, unfair competition, and that Mark Shuttleworth could have taken a different approach that would have been less destructive.
Summed up very nicely in this description of how users react when things go wrong. I was sometimes guilty of the same thing when I was still using Windows alongside Linux.
The case of the boy refused admission to the Jewish Free School (JFS) has revealed that some types of racial discrimination are legal in Britain. The key point is that he would have been admitted if his ethnicity was right.
Stumbling and Mumbling lists seven things that are wrong with women. While some will no doubt be offended, can someone explain how it is any worse than the common suggestions that men are worse at communicating, multi-tasking etc., as Flip Chart Fairy Tales points out. In addition, there is the logical link between what women are supposed to be better than men at, and what women are supposed to be worse than men at.