The “Harperman” protest song is interesting for a number of reasons: the person who wrote and sang it is a federal civil servant and is now suspended from his job for an investigation about whether he violated the Federal Government’s employee ethics agreement At issue is whether Turner violated the code of ethics that all public servants […]
This is about next year’s American election but could apply equally to the upcoming Canadian election. Our new research leaves little doubt about whether Google has the ability to control voters. In laboratory and online experiments conducted in the United States, we were able to boost the proportion of people who favored any candidate by […]
A couple weeks ago, Reddit faced a backlash from their users after they decided to ban a few sub-Reddits which they felt violated the site’s policies against harassment. Most notably this ban included a charming sub-Reddit named /r/FatPeopleHate that had over 150,000 subscribers and which featured pictures of obese people plus invitations to subscribers to ridicule the […]
(I don’t usually do disclaimers on my posts but since I work for Regina Public Library and this is a controversial topic for a lot of people, I’ll start off by mentioning that what follows are my personal opinions only and do not reflect those of RPL or anyone else who works at RPL…although given […]
An engaging article about the ability of humans, rather than machines (eg. regular Google searches), to track down and then amplify interesting or especially incriminating finds. I have been trying to help introduce the concept of “human search engine” (actually “human flesh search engine” in the original Chinese) to the English-language discourse: it arose a few […]
Fittingly you can play the hugely popular independent party game on a site called Cards Against Originality.
When I was in England on exchange in 1995, I would sometimes go to the college library and read the UK’s national papers. I still remember looking at the Travel section of The Weekend Times and seeing an ad for a “Cross-Canada Adventure”. After landing in the maritimes, you would take a coach through Quebec and […]
So I wrote about the Charlie Hebdo massacre in a rather rambling manner the other day. I’m still thinking about what happened a lot – the conflict between unrestrained freedom of speech defenders (here!) and a sort of “Can’t we all get along/be kind and non-offensive to everyone” reaction which I have some sympathy to but […]
Trigger Warning: This essay contains ideas you might not agree with. You’ve probably heard about the terrorist criminal attack today in Paris that targeted journalists and cartoonists with a satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo. Instead of trying to write an essay to capture my thoughts (since The Onion did a pretty good job on that front already), I’ll […]
