Philip Hensher has written a book–The Missing Ink–on handwriting. In it, according to Jeremy Harding, he: [T]akes the view that we impress our individuality on a page when we make signs with a pen or pencil, that our culture is reaffirmed as we persist in the practice, and that the production of handwritten texts isContinue reading “Writing: The Tools Change, the Neurosis Endures”
Category Archives: Technology
Shrapnel is Still Deadly, No Matter Where It Strikes
Many years ago, while talking to my father and some of his air force mates, I stumbled into a conversation about munitions. There was talk of rockets, shells, casings, high-explosive rounds, tracer bullets, napalm, and all of the rest. Realizing I was in the right company, I asked if someone could tell me what ‘shrapnel’Continue reading “Shrapnel is Still Deadly, No Matter Where It Strikes”
Get Your Computer’s Hands off my Students’ Essays
Last week, the New York Times alerted readers to the possibility of computers grading college-level student essays. As with any news featuring the use of ‘artificial intelligence’ to replace humans, reactions to this announcement feature the usual skewed mix of techno-boosterism, assertions of human uniqueness, and fears of deskilling and job loss. First, a sampleContinue reading “Get Your Computer’s Hands off my Students’ Essays”
Reflections on Facebook, Part Three
Facebook statuses are legendary. They have been indicted ad nauseam as archives of exhibitionism, narcissism, boring and pointless navel-gazing, repositories of TMI, and many other sins. But they still repay some attention. The Facebook status typically includes a prompt. The current one is ‘What’s on your mind?’ The one before that was ‘How are youContinue reading “Reflections on Facebook, Part Three”
Reflections on Facebook, Part Two
Facebook’ problematic relationship with privacy issues infuriates most of its users; it has ensured that no contemporary discussion of online privacy can proceed without a Facebook-related example. This has largely been the case because Facebook set out to provide a means of social networking and communication with an architecture designed to induce behavior in itsContinue reading “Reflections on Facebook, Part Two”
Reflections on Facebook, Part One
This post is the first of several posts I intend to write on my Facebook experiences. Like many (very many!) people, I’m a Facebook user. And like many of those people, I have a vexed relationship with it, a fact best demonstrated by my decision to leave Facebook a couple of years ago, close myContinue reading “Reflections on Facebook, Part One”
Should Free Software Go Into the Public Domain?
I’ve just finished an interesting Twitter conversation with Glyn Moody (author of Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, still one of the best books on the free and open source software phenomenon). Moody has written a very interesting article over at TechDirt, which wonders whether the time has come to put free andContinue reading “Should Free Software Go Into the Public Domain?”
Op-Eds and the Social Context of Science
A few years ago, I taught the third of four special interdisciplinary seminars that students of the CUNY Honors College are required to complete during the course of their degrees. The CHC3 seminar is titled Science and Technology in New York City, a moniker that is open, and subject to, broad interpretation by any facultyContinue reading “Op-Eds and the Social Context of Science”
Please, Can We Make Programming Cool?
Is any science as desperate as computer science to be really, really liked? I ask because not for the first time, and certainly not the last, I am confronted with yet another report of an effort to make computer science ‘cool’, trying in fact, to make its central component–programming–cool. The presence of technology in theContinue reading “Please, Can We Make Programming Cool?”
David Runciman is a Little Confused About the Power of Confusion
In reviewing Ferdinand Mount‘s The New Few, or a Very British Oligarchy: Power and Inequality in Britain Now (‘Confusion is Power‘, London Review of Books, Volume 34, Number 11, 7 June 2012), David Runciman writes: James Burnham, author of the The Managerial Revolution (1941) envisaged a post-democratic order in which power was concentrated in the hands of an eliteContinue reading “David Runciman is a Little Confused About the Power of Confusion”
Samir Chopra 