Month: February 2014
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Turning humans into robots
John Foreman, himself a data-scientist, writes a (somewhat rambling but) funny and self-aware essay on machine learning: Data Privacy, Machine Learning, and the Destruction of Mysterious Humanity I highly recommend you read it. Keep an eye for two coinages: “data-driven probabilistic determinism” and “data-laundered discrimination”. Machine learning is one side of the argument here. For…
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Tech and social control — an OKDG After Action
@sundaysociology and @chadkoh deep in discussion. Photo by @scdaustin How does technology influence the social and political lives of humans? That was the central topic of discussion during the second half of last night’s OKDG event. I sat down with UBCO Professor of Sociology Christopher Schneider to talk about technology and social control. My purpose…
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The death of the internet — A review of To Save Everything, Click Here
To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov Truthfully, I stayed away from this book. The overwhelming opinion of the popular tech press is that Evgeny Morozov writes like an asshole with an axe to grind. I found his first book The Net Delusion frustrating (but certainly worth it) and…
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Okanagan Bitcoin
Photo by @scdaustin Yesterday at #LeanCoffeeKL 96 we gathered to discuss cryptocurrencies. The meetup was really successful with a lot of new people coming out early in the morning to discuss and learn about bitcoin and other related topics. The spread of experience was pretty vast with long-time miners and evangelists to people who had…