Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
I was posting yesterday about how to spot bots. That is perhaps an important skill to develop because we live in an age where bots with a very specific malicious intent are being deployed to deceive and manipulate you by masquerading as a human. They promote extreme ideas, not because it is one that those behind … Read more
You may indeed have Twitter Bots that are following you or that you follow that are openly and transparently bots. These are the harmless ones run by a piece of software, and exist to provide a useful service. Examples include PoetryBot, CloudVision (A Photo Bot), or simply News Bot to tweet out headlines. Generally nobody has … Read more
There is an old joke that goes as follows. A few guys in a bar are boasting about the progress that their various nations are making in space … A Russian guy boasts, “Next year we will put a man on the Moon“. An American boasts, “That’s no big deal, we have done that. Next year we will … Read more
Google Home is a voice activated internet connected speaker. The idea is that you can ask questions and also get it to do things such as turn lights on and off (assuming you have them configured them to be part of the IOT). Hey, sounds neat. Ah but wait, what happens when advertisers twig to the observation that … Read more
Before we dive into the list, let’s start with a quick bit of Software Easter Egg history. Who was the first and why was that specific term used? The Birth of the very first Software Easter Egg Back in 1979, Warren Robinett, the developer of the Atari 2600‘s Adventure, was rather frustrated by the fact that designers like … Read more
The word Metadata is a term that is often guaranteed to cause eyes too glaze over in under five minutes, and yet it is a word that describes something that is both simple and yet deeply disruptive and transformative. The world as we now know it wold be radically different and a lot worse off … Read more