Author: Chad Kohalyk
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What your telecom provider knows about you
Last April The Star reported that in 2011 alone, the Canadian government asked telecoms and social media companies to turn over user data on Canadians 1.2 million times. An interesting sidenote: the telecoms are charging the government for the privilege. Jesse Brown covered this in a number of Canadaland podcasts including an excellent one with…
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Quarterly review: FY14Q1
Each quarter I do a quick roundup of the book and film reviews that I do on Goodreads and Letterboxd. These reviews are too short and too off-the-cuff to be included with the more indepth reviews I do on this site. Below are the highlights of the quarter. Books As for books, so far I…
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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…