There was a major terrorist attack in Paris on Friday. I have some thoughts… Part of the reason attacks like this have such an impact is that our education system has failed to overcome our innate human nature. I saw this summarized in a great graphic that points out how there are over 6 million Muslims […]
So beginning tomorrow, I’m planning to have a 19 day series of posts with various thoughts and observations about the Canadian Federal Election. My politics are no secret and much of the content will be focused on reasons why the Conservative Party of Canada led by Stephen Harper has to go but I’m hoping I can […]
The NDP has released an effective new ad that highlights some of Stephen Harper’s “friends” – various criminals, fraudsters and cheaters… That’s pretty bad but this ad only highlights the senators (Mike Duffy, Pamela Wallin) and other insiders (Nigel Wright) at the top of the Conservative party. There have also been some recent revelations that show […]
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.
