Category Archives: Technology

May 07 2013
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Book, Technology

Why we often view digital culture through insect metaphors

Hive_01

Read my latest piece for Wired.co.uk in full below or by clicking on this link. The piece also appears in New York’s arstechnica here

Humanity has often looked to the insect world for its technological metaphors, and now for digital inspiration

Swarms. Hive minds. The web*.

It can be hard to avoid talking about our digital culture without using insect metaphors.

Yet for new media theorist Jussi Parikka, it may be more than just a metaphor. Parikka is reader in Media and Design at Winchester School of Art and author of the Anne Friedberg Award-winning Insect Media.

“For me Insect Media started from a realisation and a question: why do we constantly talk about digital culture and networks through insect metaphors?” says Parikka. “Is it just a metaphoric relation? If yes, why do we make sense of high technological culture through references to these small brained, rather ‘dumb’ animals? Or is there even more to this?

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Apr 15 2013
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Technology

Predicting the future of artificial intelligence has always been a fool’s game

Read my latest for Wired.co.uk here in full or by following this link.

From the Darmouth Conferences to Turing’s test, prophecies about AI have rarely hit the mark. But there are ways to tell the good from the bad when it comes to futurology.

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Apr 01 2013
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Book, Technology

The web’s oldest dark art: Can spam be canned?

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Read my latest for The Independent here in full or by following this link. It has also now been syndicated to papers in South Africa, The Gulf States and India.

There are 100 billion spam emails sent daily. But that number is decreasing. Does this signal the end of the web’s oldest dark art?

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Mar 09 2013
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Publishing, Technology

Nudging UK Book Discovery Toward the Mainstream

The-Nudge-List-510x386

This was a couple of weeks ago now….but read my headline story for the New York based Publishing Perspectives in full here or by following this link.

Are you fed with up with the overwhelming choice offered by Amazon, or — as in my case — suspicious of their scarily accurate personalized emails, but just too lazy to go to your local book store (if you still have one)?

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Jan 21 2013
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Technology

US Army backs startups in war zones in bid to reduce violence

Read my latest for Wired in full below or here…
Talley

Lieutenant General Jeffrey Talley used US Army funds to back promising Iraqi entrepreneurs to set up engineering and tech startups in a bid to lure young men away from the Iranian-backed militia. Can this strategy of “engineering the peace” be replicated elsewhere?

Six months ago Lieutenant General Jeffrey W. Talley earned his third star when he was appointed Chief of the US Army Reserve. Its 205,000 part-time soldiers form in their own right a large enough force to invade a country.

Five years ago, in January 2008, this Irish Catholic entrepreneur, academic and now full-time soldier found himself dodging IEDs (improvised explosive devices) in Iraq, with a $500,000 bounty placed on his head by the Mahdi Army as he tried to restore security to the 2.5 million people who lived in the notorious suburb of Baghdad known as Sadr City.

His crime had been to realise how he could use “good old-fashioned capitalism” to defeat the Iranian-backed militia that ran the city like the “old Mafia” used to do in the USA.

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Dec 21 2012
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Technology

Chinese investors target British university spin-outs

Read my latest for Wired in full below or follow this link

Chinese are coming pic

Chinese venture capitalists and angel investors are flocking to UK universities to invest in early-stage technologies. However, some spin-outs are worried about protecting their intellectual property

While the possible cyber-threat to the UK posed by Chinese multinational Huawei’s penetration of the telecoms market may be occupying David Cameron’s mind this Christmas, on our university campuses another Chinese “invasion” is taking place. And this time we are not talking about undergraduates.

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Dec 21 2012
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Technology

What Barack Obama can teach Tesco and co

Read my latest feature article for The Independent (front page story) and the “i” in full here or click here.

The friendly big red capital letters of the email welcoming me to the world of online gambling – “WELCOME ABOARD. GAME ON” – were in marked contrast to the Orwellian feel of the site’s age-verification policy that I had found just a click away.

It promised to use a third party to electronically verify that I was who I said I was by using my name, address, date of birth and phone number, and said the results might be retained for use by other businesses in the future. It meant that whatever I shared and whatever they had on me was going to remain forever out there in cyberspace, beyond my control.

And if I’d failed the test, I may even have had to verify my identity through a Skype interview.

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Dec 05 2012
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Drones, Technology

Former WW2 airfield in Wales transformed into drone testing ground

A bit late again…..read my latest for Wired.co.uk below or follow this link. This also appeared in Wired.com in the States here.

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A month before the 9/11 bombings, entrepreneur Ray Mann bought a former WW2 airfield in Wales and is now turning it into a centre for military and civilian drone research. Wired.co.uk investigates

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Nov 20 2012
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Technology

The floating future: Are blimps about to make a comeback?

A bit late but read my latest feature for The Independent & the “i” by following this link or in full below….

Three months ago, on 10 August, the off-white, doughnut-like prototype of a revolutionary unmanned airship took off from a New Jersey airfield in the latest attempt to break the curse of the Hindenburg. The crash of the flaming Nazi airship in front of the world’s media in 1937 put a brake on the development of a technology that was labelled as promising then, and still is today, 70 years later.

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Nov 20 2012
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Technology

A metamaterial which could stop electronics from eating the planet

A bit late but  read my latest for Technology Guardian in full and not just a link……..top four story three days in a row…..including interview with Warren East of ARM and videos….follow this link or read it below.

Go into a big electronics retailer such as PC World and you’ll find no signs that boast of the percentage of recycled electronic components a laptop or smart TV uses. And it’s probably an arrangement that suits many in the industry, as they make their money selling more and more new components.

However, a technology that is about to be spun out of Oxford University may change this forever.

“It is a technology that is going to fundamentally change the way we build computers,” says Dr Mark Gostock, a technology transfer manager at the University of Oxford’s ISIS Innovation. “And there are going to be a lot of people who make a whole lot of money from the way we do it now who aren’t going to be happy when they hear what we have got.”

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