Year: 2014
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Ignite SF
During our month in San Francisco last year we were lucky to catch Ignite San Francisco 8. We had a great time that night. IgniteSF just put up the videos this month, so I thought I would share some of my faves from that evening. Each talk is just 5 mins long. There were about…
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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…
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Amateur academia
Despite the end of the “golden age of academia”, I yearn for an even earlier time: the time of 18th century coffee houses, or as they were known: penny universities. I have been out of academia for a few years (BA from UBC in ’02, MA from RMC in ’08) but I have maintained an…
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Politics over politech
Evgeny Morozov’s intellectual assaults on “cyber utopianism” and “internet centrism” are well known — if often dismissed by the tech elite. I have been reading his new book To Save Everything, Click Here which so far is a pretty good exercise in skepticism and contrarianism. Yet it is in his most recent New Yorker essay…
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おめでとうございます — Happy New Year!
(See all pictures and videos at Flickr) Happy 2014! This year the grandparents watched the kids so the wife and I could go out for 初詣 (hatsumode), the traditional first trip of the year to the shrine. We left our downtown Kyoto apartment at about 11PM and had a full course of shrine-visiting, including: 電電宮…